Infrastructure change notice

GovCMS will soon be upgrading part of the hosting infrastructure used by all websites on the platform. We will be switching from RedHat OpenShift to Amazon EKS. This will be a seamless transition and will ensure the ongoing resilience of your GovCMS website(s), ensuring faster scalability of the infrastructure in the event of spikes in web traffic, and maintaining the high security standards of the GovCMS platform.

We are planning to start migrating GovCMS production websites to the upgraded infrastructure in October 2021, with work scheduled to be finished by mid-December 2021. Migrations will occur in scheduled batches and take place after hours, mostly on weekends.

Non-production environments will not be migrated unless specifically requested. Most of the time this won’t be needed.

We will send confirmation of your assigned batch and migration date to your website’s Primary Contact as soon as possible. Please make sure your Primary Contact details with GovCMS are up to date.

What do you need to do?

• Once you have received confirmation of your assigned batch and migration date, confirm the correct people received the information and that the proposed migration date works for your agency.
  
  
  
  If you need to add or change your contacts, or the proposed date is not suitable, let us know as soon as possible by raising a Service Desk ticket.
  
   
• Plan for a short code and content freeze during your website's migration. Let us know as soon as possible via a Service Desk ticket if you have any planned work scheduled over this period. We will use this information to help with our planning
  
  
  
  You won't be able to make any code or content changes to your website during your website's migration. This is to mitigate any risk of lost changes. 
  
   
• Wrap up any work being done on non-production environments (branches) in the period leading up to the migration as GovCMS will only be moving production environments to the upgraded infrastructure.
  
  
  
  Non-production environments will not be migrated unless you specifically request it. Most non-production websites will not need to be migrated and can simply be recreated if needed after the migration.
  
   
• Raise a Service Desk ticket if you have any non-production environments that you think need to be migrated. We will consider these on a case-by-case basis.

If you have any questions or concerns before or after the migration of your site, please raise a Service Desk ticket and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.