Bitten by downtime – Here’s what’s next

Christian Hammond

Updated 4:18PM: We came back up just over an hour ago, but were not totally reliable, as Amazon’s services were still under maintenance. Things seem to have now stabilized, and you should be able to use RBCommons reliably again.

 

A few minutes ago, we were alerted to the fact that RBCommons is down. We host on Amazon, and it seems the file storage backend we use is temporarily down, which they’re looking into. On the one-hand, it means they’re on it, and we should be back up soon. On the other, it means everyone is down right now.

This, of course, sucks.

I expect we’ll be back up pretty soon. In the meantime, here’s what we’re going to do to make this less of a problem in the future.

We’ve been preparing this past week on enhancing Review Board and RBCommons so that we can more easily scale out across more of what Amazon calls “availability zones.” We’re close, and when we’re done, we’ll be spreading out our services and adding some more redundancy so this won’t bite us again.

We’re also going to work to become less reliant on EBS, so that if it goes down again, it won’t impact us, or you.

If you were impacted by this today, e-mail us and let us know. We’ll work to make you happy.

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New sleek redesign

Christian Hammond

Last night we deployed some new changes to our landing page, pricing page, and overall RBCommons site styles. The new landing page gives new users a small tour of the RBCommons features. We’ll update this as new features are introduced.

We decided it was time to give RBCommons a bit of a visual refresh, so this was the start of that. You’ll begin to see this on many of the pages. The code review sections are still as they were, but in time we’ll refresh these as well to better match.

Now unfortunately, this came at a cost. We had a temporary issue with registration that lasted a few hours. Our credit card integration broke and new teams couldn’t sign up. I’m very sorry if this affected you. If you were affected, please let us know, and try again.

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Let’s Keep In Touch :)

Christian Hammond

RBCommons has been growing up. Once upon a time, we had only a few early teams signed up, and back then e-mail worked just fine for support and announcements. These days, it’s another story, and we really needed to give you all a better insight into what’s going on with RBCommons.

We’re now giving you two easy ways to do that.

The first is the new RBCommons blog (what you’re reading here!). You can easily subscribe to our feed, or just, you know, set this as your home page. Why not.

The second is the new @RBCommons Twitter account. Any new posts here will go there, along with any emergency announcements, or whatever we feel like posting.

And as always, if you ever have any questions or comments, you can easily contact us.

Say hi sometime!

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