Scaling the Cloud: how we upgraded all of our customers’ instances

One of the advantages of cloud computing is the flexibility and redundancy it offers. If your cloud provider is running a fully redundant platform (in my opinion it can’t be done right  any other way), most maintenance tasks can be performed without any impact for customers.

A good example of this is the upgrade project we recently finished and announced today. A few weeks ago, we decided to increase the specifications of all of our Virtual Server and Cloud packages – at no additional cost. We also decided to upgrade our existing customers’ packages with the same capacity boost to thank them for their continuing loyalty.

When building a cloud platform, one of the most important components is the hypervisor. A hypervisor is a physical server that runs the virtual server and cloud instances. The cool thing about cloud computing is that we can work on these hypervisors without our customers noticing. This is particularly handy when we want to scale; we add capacity on a regular basis to accommodate for customer growth and to make sure there’s enough spare capacity in case one of the hypervisors has a hardware issue. Or in case customers are running more demanding workloads. This mechanism is exactly what we used to prepare the platforms for the new packages.

In the last couple of weeks we worked on our biggest platform upgrade yet―we picked up hundreds of additional memory modules and a bunch of brand new hypervisors from our warehouse and got to work. After placing the additional hypervisors, all the existing ones were put in maintenance mode one by one, and physically upgraded by adding more memory. All of this went by without a hitch― none of our customers even noticed we were upgrading the platform ― and we can now start handing out those extra resources.

If you’re an existing Cloud or Virtual Server customer, you’ll receive (or will already have received) a message informing you of the additional cores and memory we’ll add to your instances. We’ll upgrade all of our customers in batches, you’ll receive a second message to let you know when that has been completed. I hope you’ll enjoy the upgrades and thank you again for supporting Leaseweb Cloud!