Dear popowayCloud Customers,
It has been over 6 years since we first launched our service offerings. While our versatile components are vastly distributed and fault-resistent, there are growing amount of services currently hosted on our platform that critically rely on assets and scripts stored in our very first mainframe server.
This node, known as us-east-1a on our DNS table, runs CentOS version 6, which is already deprecated multiple years ago by the open source community. During the health crisis and before the official subset of its OS, we have fully dismantled the public network interface and all dynamic content generation mechanisms on that system. Therefore, it is currently served as a dedicated static assets node and popowayCloud CDN mirror server. Additionally, all network connections are bridged via our distributed connection interfaces and network partners to ensure minimized external threats.
Despite all safeguards currently implemented, we understand that it is always best practice to completely remove access to an outdated node and migrate all affected services to newer nodes. The following timeline outlines our upcoming procedures on the retiring of us-east-1a node:
Phase 1: Infrastructure test
Sometime in Spring 2023, we will prepare hardware and launch one node located in our North America data center as the migration destination for this operation. The detailed configurations for this node, including the system access commands and capacity, will be announced at a later date.
Additionally, this infrastructure test phase will allow us to execute parallel test with the equivalent hardware on arm64 architecture instead of x64. Arm64 is known for its efficiency and low power consumption. After an internal evaluation is completed, we will release both products as a voluntary alpha test for selected customers.
Phase 2: Hybrid A/B test and gradual migration
We expect to begin the data migration process during Summer 2023. In the meantime, various services which utilize popowayCloud CDN or other assets stored on us-east-1a will be routed to the new infrastructure. After all affected assets are identified, they are labelled with a scaled hybrid A/B test in our iptable system, in a load balancer fashion. The ratio increases as we identify possible issues and fix them, but no downtime or interruption of services should be expected.
Phase 3: us-east-1a shutdown and OS upgrade
We will constantly oversee the network traffic of us-east-1a throughout Phase 2. Approximately three months after Phase 2 has entirely completed, we will shutdown the hardware of us-east-1a to signify the official process for retiring this node. Afterwards, the hardware will be reused to conduct further research on a potentially OS upgrade so that hardware waste may be reduced. We will release another support article with our customers on this matter by the end of 2023.
Rest assured, your personal data and privacy are always our priority, which will be secured throughout the retiring phases via our Privacy Policy and Service Level Agreements (if applicable). Please feel free to contact support@popoway.cloud or your designated sales representative should you have further questions.
Sincerely,
popowayCloud Team