Update 2019-04-23: The maintenance went as planned.
Current status We have hit some unexpected issues and have rescheduled - title and dates below are updated. The work listed below for Monday/Tuesday has already been completed, the rest of the work will be completed on the day we perform the failover.
tl;dr: Planned service interruption that will impact all Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange sites, Jobs, Chat, and Teams. All sites will be read-only for up to an hour during the maintenance. Enterprise cloud hosted instances will not be impacted.
Short Version:
There will be a service degradation for up to an hour this upcoming week - possibly April 23rd, 2019 at 23:30 UTC (7:30 PM US/Eastern). During that time questions and answers will still display, job listings will still work, and job ads will still display. However, the site will be "read only," i.e. people won't appear logged-in, won't be able to add/edit new job listings, apply for jobs, create, edit or vote on questions/comments/answers, reputation won't change, etc. This should minimize the disruption to the majority of casual readers. We will display a banner on the sites stating we're 'read only' for maintenance. We expect that the site will be in a read-only state for less than an hour.
Longer More Technical Version of What’s Happening?
Background
Our primary database servers are currently running on Windows Server 2012. We have two Windows Failover Clusters, one for Stack Overflow and one for Stack Exchange (Careers), each cluster contains three database servers. We will be upgrading the servers to Windows Server 2016. During the service interruption, we will be performing a failover of the servers still on Windows Server 2012 to the servers already on Windows Server 2016.
What we'll be doing
As mentioned we are using Windows Failover Clustering, along with SQL Server Always On Availability Groups, and Distributed Availability Groups to keep our data in sync across various servers, while giving us redundancy in multiple locations (NY and CO). Starting next week, we will be upgrading the operating systems across these servers to Windows Server 2016.
This upgrades involves many moving pieces, but high-level we will be doing the following next week:
Monday: we will be removing a NY server (currently a secondary) from an existing Windows Failover Cluster. The server will get a clean install of Windows Server 2016, a new Failover Cluster will be created, SQL Server 2017 will be reinstalled, and we will create new Availability Groups and new Distributed Availability Groups. By doing this, this server should start to receive data from the current primary SQL Server i.e. the one still in the old 2012 cluster.
Tuesday: another NY Secondary will follow the same path as the one on Monday.
Wednesday: the remote secondaries in CO will be removed from the old 2012 clusters, rebuilt, and put into the new 2016 failover clusters.
At this point, we will have a GO / NO-GO on the failover. If everything goes according to plan and we feel comfortable, then we will perform the failover (scheduled maintenance) . If anything gets delayed or if there are unexpected issues, then we will push the maintenance to later.
We will not be moving forward with the failover until we are comfortable.
When we perform the maintenance, we will be pointing the applications to the new 2016 servers and performing a SQL failover of the Distributed Availability Groups. We expect that the site will be in a read-only state for about an hour. During this time, we will be making progress announcements and updates on @StackStatus, so following along there if you're interested.
This is a very complicated move that we are making, which has been fully tested in a lab environment, but you can never be sure of anything during these types of operations. As Nick Craver said:
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth - Mike Tyson
Questions or concerns?
Please post a comment or answer below; I'll do my best to address any concerns between now and the maintenance window.
