Reminder: this is happening today; the maintenance banner should be online in a few minutes, and the migration will actually begin in about 2 hours.
On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 3:33 PM, Guillaume Paumier <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > As we announced a few days ago, we expect some technical disruption next > week on all Wikimedia sites due to our migration to a new data center. There > will be some times when the sites will be in read-only mode, and there may > be full outages. > > I'm about to launch the global message delivery about this, to make sure > that all wikis are notified, but I wanted to share the full announcement > with you. > > I would particularly like to request your help as ambassadors with the > following: > * Once the message is posted on your wiki, please help to translate it so > that your fellow Wikimedians can understand it. > * Please spread the word on your wiki using the usual channels ("News" > template, or community portal, etc.) > * Next week, please continue to explain what is happening to your fellow > Wikimedians, and if appropriate, let us know if your wiki encounters durable > issues: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_maintenance_notice > > I appreciate your help, and I'm available to answer your comments or > questions. > > Thank you! > Guillaume > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > > > Posted today on the Wikimedia Tech Blog: > https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/19/wikimedia-sites-move-to-primary-data-center-in-ashburn-virginia/ > > Wikimedia sites to move to primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia > > Next week, the Wikimedia Foundation will transition its main technical > operations to a new data center in Ashburn, Virginia, USA. This is intended > to improve the technical performance and reliability of all Wikimedia sites, > including Wikipedia. > > Engineering teams have been preparing for the migration to minimize > inconvenience to our users, but major service disruption is still expected > during the transition. Our sites will be in read-only mode for some time, > and may be intermittently inaccessible. Users are advised to be patient > during those interruptions, and share information in case of continued > outage or loss of functionality. > > The current target windows for the migration are January 22nd, 23rd and > 24th, 2013, from 17:00 to 01:00 UTC (see other timezones on > timeanddate.com). > > Wikimedia sites have been hosted in our main data center in Tampa, Florida, > since 2004; before that, the couple of servers powering Wikipedia were in > San Diego, California. Ashburn is the third and newest primary data center > to host Wikimedia sites. > > A major reason for choosing Tampa, Florida as the location of the primary > data center in 2004 was its proximity to founder Jimmy Wales’ home, at a > time when he was much more involved in the technical operations of the site. > In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Operations team started to > look for other locations with better network connectivity and more clement > weather. Located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Ashburn offers > faster and more reliable connectivity than Tampa, and usually fewer > hurricanes. > > The Operations team started to plan and prepare for the Virginia data center > in Summer 2010. The actual build-out and racking of servers at the > colocation facility started in February 2011, and was followed by a long > period of hardware, system and software configuration. Traffic started to be > served to users from the Ashburn data center in November 2011, in the form > of CSS and JavaScript assets (served from “bits.wikimedia.org“). > > We reached a major milestone in February 2012, when caching servers were set > up to handle read-only requests for Wikipedia and Wikimedia content, which > represent most of the traffic to Wikipedia and its sister sites. In April > 2012, the Ashburn data center also started to serve media files (from > “upload.wikimedia.org“). > > Cacheable requests represent about 90 percent of our traffic, leaving 10 > percent that requires interaction with our web (Apache) and database (MySQL) > servers, which are still being hosted in Tampa. Until now, every edit made > to a Wikipedia page has been handled by the servers in Tampa. This > dependency on our Tampa data center was responsible for the site outage in > August 2012, when a fiber cut severed the connection between our two > locations. > > Starting next week, the new servers in Ashburn will take on that role as > well, and all our sites will be able to function fully without relying on > the servers in Florida. The legacy data center in Tampa will continue to be > maintained, and will serve as a secondary “hot failover” data center: > servers will be in standby mode to take over, should the primary site > experiences an outage. Server configuration and data will be synchronized > between the two locations to ensure a transition as smooth as possible in > case of technical difficulties in Ashburn. > > Besides just installing newer hardware, setting up the data center in > Ashburn has also been an opportunity for architecture overhauls, like > incremental improvements of the text storage system, and the move to an > entirely new media storage system to keep up with the growth of the content > generated and curated by our contributors. > > Wikimedia’s technical infrastructure aims to be as open and collaborative as > the sites it powers. Most of the configuration of our servers is publicly > accessible, and the Wikimedia Labs initiative allows contributors to test > and submit improvements to the sites’ configuration files. > > The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates a total of about 885 servers, > and serves about 20 billion page views a month, on a non-profit budget that > relies almost entirely on donations from readers. > > > -- > Guillaume Paumier > Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation > https://donate.wikimedia.org -- Guillaume Paumier Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation https://donate.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
