When writing about the hardware running Launchpad, or even the complexity of the codebase, I’m always tempted to start off by borrowing from Douglas Adams’ introduction to The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Launchpad is big. Really big.”
With such a big system, it’s inevitable that from time to time we have to rearrange the furniture a little. Aside from our monthly code roll-out, where Launchpad goes read-only for an hour or so, we occasionally have to swap out or reconfigure hardware, as you’d expect. Up until now, we’ve used a combination of this blog and the launchpad-announce mailing list to keep you up to date on any Launchpad service-affecting issues but we haven’t had a canonical (heh) status page to which you can refer and know you’re going to get a definitive answer.
So, now we have the Launchpad status page!
It’s hosted by the excellent identi.ca so you can subscribe using your identi.ca account or to the Atom or RSS feed. We’re also automatically copying everything over to the launchpadstatus Twitter account.
What does it cover?
We’re using the identi.ca-hosted status page to announce service-affecting issues that are happening right now or that we know will happen in the following 48 hours.
Also, we’re only going to post when the main production Launchpad site or the edge environment are affected, as they’re the two environments in which you can do real work.
Longer-term planning
As the status page only covers what’s happening in the next 48 hours, it’s not so useful for longer-term planning. So, as soon as we know about any pending service-interruption, we’ll add it to the maintenance page of the Launchpad dev wiki.
Blog and email updates
We’ll still continue to post notification of down-time here on the Launchpad blog and to the launchpad-announce mailing list. However, we’ll limit those posts to planned maintenance that’s likely to affect a sizeable number of people.
For things happening right now, or that are likely to be no more than the equivalent of a minor bump in the road, we’ll post them to the identi.ca-hosted status page only.
Elsewhere on identi.ca
Don’t forget, we also have a news account on identi.ca and also Twitter.
