As we’ve discussed before, part of being PCI Level 1 Compliant is doing monthly updates to our infrastructure. This involves upgrades and updates and patches to the operating systems and other core pieces like NGINX and Apache servers.
This month we also did an upgrade to the latest version of the Aurora Database on Amazon. It is always amazing that we do this so quickly and with ZERO downtime for our customers. We basically switch from the Primary database instance to the live backup server that is always running (this has the added benefit of testing if there are problems with the main server, we know this process really works). We then upgrade the main server, then turn that into the backup server. We then make that original master server the master again, but now all upgraded. Then the backup server gets updated.
This used to take companies (and still does in many instances) weeks to plan and implement. The cloud is making technology companies more and more efficient – so we can focus on doing real software that helps races. And this also has a huge impact on why we can stay so reliable (knock on wood, we have been without any outage for over 3 years with about 6,000 upgrades in that time).