Hosting Service Manual

Overview

During a weekly scheduled maintenance window various changes are automatically made to environments, including but not limited to:

• Operating system updates and patches are applied, including service packs where relevant
• Infrastructure level application updates are applied, for example monitoring agents 
• GOSS Platform components and dependencies are updated, for example iCM, API Server workers, Java, etc
• GOSS Platform standardised site, which includes the latest releases of all site/framework components and products (note that not all clients are on the standardised site pipeline)
• Configuration changes such as SSL hardening will be applied

During the scheduled maintenance, applications, services and hosts may be restarted which can result in a brief disruption to the running services depending on the configuration of your hosted environment and the nature of changes applied.

Web Applications are updated during a dedicated Monday Morning maintenance window. These are handled separately to wider application maintenance tasks, to prevent unexpected maintenance overlap issues. The web applications are responsible for the functional display of your subsites/content to the internet. Things like the iCM Application and the various services supporting this are managed by the global scheduled maintenance patterns already described.

Scheduling

Scheduled maintenance jobs run between 00:00 and 05:59 on the following days of the week.

Staging

All application versions and operating system updates are staged between environments to ensure adequate testing happens before updating Production.

The schedule above ensures that there will always be six days between a given job being performed and it progressing to the next environment. For example, a fix deployed to a development environment on a Friday won't be promoted to the test environment until the following Thursday.

This results in a total lead time between development and production of 18 days, giving ample time for testing. If an issue is found with any application or update the promotion of the versions to the next environment will be delayed whilst the issue is being investigated.

Web applications follow a seven day rolling schedule between environments. For example a new Web Application release deployed to a Development environment on a Monday morning won't be promoted to the Test environment until the following Monday. By default, this results in an average lead time between development and production of 21 days, however this can be lowered to a minimum of 17 days if a release is required throughout the week.

Weekly and Daily Checks

Every working day an engineer is assigned to run through daily checks which includes but is not limited to:

• Checking scheduled jobs such as backups, maintenance and automated DR jobs for any failures
• Investigate low priority informational alerts

View Scheduling Information

You can see an overview of product versions, deployment histories, and scheduled deployments by logging into MyGOSS (opens new window) and following the link to "My Platform".