Dear Wikitechians,
On *Wednesday September 20th*, the SRE team will run a planned data center
switchover, moving all wikis from our data center in Virginia to the data
center in Texas. This is an important periodic test of our tools and
procedures, to ensure the wikis will continue to be available even in the
event of major technical issues in our primary home. It also gives all our
SRE and ops teams a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems in
Virginia that normally run 24 hours a day.
The switchover process requires a *brief read-only period for all
Foundation-hosted wikis*, which will start at *14:00 UTC on Wednesday
**September
20th*, and will last for a few minutes while we execute the migration as
efficiently as possible. All our public and private wikis will be
continuously available for reading as usual, but no one will be able to
save edits during the process. Users will see a notification of the
upcoming maintenance, and anyone still editing will be asked to try again
in a few minutes.
CommRel will soon begin notifying communities of the read-only window.
If you like, you can follow along on the day in the public
#wikimedia-operations channel on IRC (instructions for joining here
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Instructions>). To report any issues,
you can reach us in #wikimedia-sre on IRC, or file a Phabricator ticket
with the *datacenter-switchover* tag (pre-filled form here
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/1/?projects=Datacenter-Switchover&subscribers=kamila>);
we'll be monitoring closely for reports of trouble during and after the
switchover. (If you're new to Phab, there's more information at
Phabricator/Help.) The switchover and its preparation will be tracked in
Phabricator task T345263 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T345263>.
On behalf of the SRE team, please excuse the disruption, and our thanks to
everyone in a number of departments who've been involved in planning this
work. Feel free to reply directly to me with any questions.
Thank you,
Kamila Součková (they/them)
Senior SRE
Wikimedia Foundation