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.
Should you update the instance(s) on your own?
We encourage our Subscribers 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 without informing 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 platform having a major bug that had escaped the QA of the developing team of the platform.
Our approach on software updates
For the reasons mentioned above, we test each major release on our test environment, and then if everything looks good, we inform you (our Subscriber) about the specific date we plan 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.
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. 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.
Software updates are implemented two (2) weeks from the release date the earliest, unless there is a security update involved.
In certain cases and where applicable, we will make sure to also add a notification notice (see below for an example of such notification on a Gitlab instance) for the day and time that the scheduled maintenance will be implemented.
