It feels like a lot has been done this week, which is good. It helps that all team members have been available this week, not that having time off is a bad thing!
We started the week with our old friend WordPress. We found out late on Sunday night that two Hackney sites had fallen over. Emergency action was taken to restore both sites and to amend the EC2s they run on, so that this shouldn’t happen again. The real solution, though, is to complete the move to the new infrastructure. This has been going slowly due to an issue in the load balancers, but we think we’ve resolved that now.
Migration work has picked up again; the first grants application is nearly finished after being paused for a few days for urgent support work. We will review whether to move the other two now or later, in view of this week’s government announcements. At account level, we are almost in a position to move the DevelopmentAPIs account, but have discovered that it has only one subnet – which the move process tries to destroy. We’re investigating a workaround.
We’ve been supporting the Mosaic project a good bit this week. The EC2 box they need has been built and the client installed, and we are just waiting for Servelec to amend the VPN configuration on their side. We’ve also now obtained a trial licence for Host Access to test with Plus5, and need to set up a VPN for that. Finally on the networking front, we had a really constructive discussion with Data Platform about making access to Qlik as secure as possible, given the desire to take it out of AppStream but in the knowledge that it’s not compatible with Globalprotect. A paper will be discussed at TDA next week.
We reviewed our roadmap this week. Most of the changes were to break existing items down into smaller chunks, but we have added new tasks to create new Terraform modules (as a result of the Backstage paper mentioned last week) and to iterate existing ones. One iteration pulled forward is to change the default setting in the Overnight Shutdown module to TRUE, so that all EC2s will shut down overnight unless explicitly changed. This change will be merged soon and will apply when you next update your Terraform, so be aware and take necessary action to ensure that any EC2s needed overnight remain powered up.
