Scheduled maintenance & software updates

In this page, we explain our approach on instance updates from the actual version you are using to a new one.

When is an instance updated

The approach we have decided to follow for the management of all the instances is to update to major stable releases, unless there is a security or an unscheduled critical update. We have found this to be a more stable and secure approach. Minor updates might also break some things in the instance, which will force us to revert to the previous version and cause disruption and potential downtime to our Subscribers.

Instance update procedure

Due to potential downtime to the instance(s) we manage, we inform our Subscribers beforehand, at least five (5) business days before we proceed with an update.

Nextcloud update procedure:

Should you update the instance(s) on your own?

We encourage our subscribersSubscribers that do their best to follow the security practices. One of these practices is to have every software you use up to date. But if every subscriber updates their instance whenwithout theyinforming feel,our support team, it can cause a lot of issues on a hosting provider side. The issues can be from simple to fix like an app not working on new releases, to the Nextcloud platform having a major bug that had escaped the QA.QA For issues withof the Nextclouddeveloping appsteam of the fixplatform. is somewhat simple we can revert to a known release, but for the entire platform Downgrading is not possible, and we can only go forward.

Our aproceapproach on upgradessoftware updates

For thesethe reasons mentioned above, we test each major release on our test environment, and then if everything passeslooks good, we inform you (our subscriber)Subscriber) thatabout onthe thisspecific date we willplan to update your instance. On this testing phase, we test major release or minor releases that contain vulnerability fixes. Vulnerability issues on well-developed platforms such as Nextcloud are uncommon, but they still can happen once in a while. This is why we do our best to test and notify you in a timeline as short as humanly possible.
Our update procedure is fully automated (we let our automation code do the work) and ensure no human error is present while updating.

A bit of information on the Nextcloud releases:

The Nextcloud release schedule is Max-min releases, meaning that there are minor releases like 25.0.3 that can contain small improvements and fix stability issues or sometimes important security fixes. While major version like 25 can have big changes like the way they handle data or user management.

Scheduled maintenance

When we need to proceed with a software/platform update, we plan on a scheduled maintenance to your instance. In this case, the main contact person responsible for the Subscription package will be notified by email (at least).email. We usually work on planned instance updates on weekends (Saturday to be more specific), unless there is a request from one of our Subscribers to act differently. The reason we choose Saturdays is due to the fact that we don't want to disrupt your work during weekdays when the instances are used the most usually.

In certain cases and where applicable, we will make sure to also add a notification notice (see below)below for an example of such notification on a Gitlab instance) for the day and time that the scheduled maintenance will be implemented.