Comprehensive modernisation of our network infrastructure in 2024
It is necessary and our obligation to continuously invest in improving our infrastructure in order to fulfil your requirements for our platform operation now - and in the future. The upcoming modernisation work is part of our strategy to continuously optimise the stability, scalability and security of our services.
What will happen during the modernisation work?
During the maintenance week from 13 May 2024 to 17 May 2024, we will rebuild and modernise our entire network stack. This work will be carried out step-by-step and will be accompanied and monitored by our experienced platform team to ensure that everything runs smoothly. We have already tested all the necessary steps in advance in our lab and backup environments in Halle to ensure that you and the users of your applications are not aware of our work.
What does this mean in technical terms?
We are implementing EVPN-VXLAN - this will enable us to isolate customer networks even more, just as we have already done with compute and storage resources. This turns our platform into a comprehensive Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
All interfaces in VMs (srv/fe) will receive actively redundant 10G interfaces. This means that every component in our infrastructure now has a fully active redundant design. A failure of an individual component will then not require any scheduled, manual intervention on our part to continue operations.
Future maintenance work on the network infrastructure can be carried out completely online thanks to this redundancy.
Network reorganisation without downtime? Is that possible?
We have explicitly designed the migration process so that no planned interruptions are required. As we have already designed all other functions (compute, storage, routing) to be actively redundant and with live migration, we will gradually evacuate individual servers, convert them and put them back into operation with the new network configuration. At the same time, there is a bridge between the old and new configuration, so that a rolling reorganisation allows exactly the desired freedom from interruption.
At the same time, we will keep an eye on the availability and performance of our platform and your applications at all times with increased vigilance so that we can react quickly in the event of unexpected effects.
Redundancy and targeted preparation is our key!
Our - already - fully redundant network infrastructure and our comprehensive tests in the lab give us a good feeling of being optimally prepared for the work ahead. Should we encounter any unforeseen problems, our teams are ready to implement solutions as quickly as possible. We have the current, error-free network infrastructure as a fallback/security.
