Since the very beginning the Sandbox’s infrastructure has been supported in a small but mighty DMZ in Galway, Ireland. Thanks to steady growth, we’ve finally reached the need expand into a larger datacenter that support our high availability, cloud-ification, scale and growth objectives!
So what does this mean to you?
Here’s a few easy points:
- The Sandbox will be offline for migration, testing, and QA between 1/14/17 and 1/18/17.
- After the migration, accessing and using the Sandbox will be 99% the same as before.
- Any labs available before the upgrade will be available after (baring short-term migration issues).
- Our capacity will be significantly greater than our current setup.
- The capacity gains won’t be instant, little tweaks will be made in labs to support this over the next few months.
- Some labs won’t support our new capacity and will need to be rebuilt, this will take some time.
- In March, we will begin to offer “bulk reservations” for events. Want to host a class, hackathon, training session with 20 or more labs? We can do that! Check the homepage in March for more details.
- Only one session will be allowed per VPN user, so you won’t be able to share VPN credentials for labs anymore. Adding users to your reservation will provision them a unique a VPN account to access the lab so sharing is still possible.
- Our HA implementation means less downtime!
- The Sandbox should feel quicker with our powerful new equipment and automation.
Overall, these changes are coming to bring you a better, faster and stronger Sandbox! We have also planned for expansion to allow for expansive future growth. This has been made possible by your continued use and support of the Sandbox, so keep on keepin’ on! If you have any questions or comments about our migration (or anything else), please engage with us in the community. We do apologize for the downtime necessary to complete this migration.
Signing off,
Jacob Adams
