Tom Grozev Posted January 31, 2021 Share Posted January 31, 2021 The long awaited transfer of resources to AWS has now been completed. All VATPAC services are now fully running on AWS services. While there were a lot of moving parts involved and a significant amount of changes occurred behind the scenes, a brief overview of the important and noteworthy changes are mentioned in this post. What the changes bring The move to AWS improves the security, privacy and reliability of VATPAC's services. Services have been observed to perform better than before and after a trail with some services, it was deemed that the remaining services will be moved. AWS reduces the cost of maintaining VATPAC services and allows for an improved experience for the wider membership. Along with the migration of services, other changes were made for an overall service upgrade, some of which are listed below. VATPAC CDN To unify the use of static resources, these are now stored on a centralized Content Delivery Network (CDN). The CDN provides global delivery and high speed file serving to all VATPAC services. Forums Changes The VATPAC forums now has a new look and feel to it! The redesign is cursory of @Callum Strawbridge who put a significant effort in to customize the look of the forums for a more modern design. The forums now uploads all images and attachments to the VATPAC CDN, improving the access and performance of static resource handling. New Homepage To match the new design of the forums a new homepage is now released. The homepage, like the forums theme change, is a fresh new look that will better serve the membership. A big thanks to @Callum Strawbridge and @Zach Biesse-Fitton for their huge roles in the customization of the pages. Academy The training academy got an update as well as a theme change the fitted better with the other design changes. The academy is now also using VATSIM Connect (SSOv2) to replace the old SSO. Core Core has been running on AWS for the past few months and has since been adjusted behind the scenes for improved performance. Homepage statistics The homepage statistics have temporarily been removed but will be returning in the next week. So don't worry they aren't gone for good. Ongoing issues With the significant change of services there are likely to be unforeseen issues that may arise, namely legacy links. When data was transferred, a big clean up of old files and links was carried out. This marks the first proper consolidation of VATPAC services in over 5 years. We have multiple backups of these files so if there are any broken links or missing files that were used externally (or even internally) that are found, please email [email protected] and it will be resolved as soon as possible. While we have done our best to minimize bugs, some bugs can be expected. If you are having any issues at all, please email me at [email protected] For all staff the files that were previously available for archive purposes, they will soon be available to any member of staff through the VATPAC Google Drive. Previous Service Issues During the process of transferring some services, unforeseen issues arose that affected the uptime of said services. Sometimes a service would go down without notice or an issue would arise that would prevent use of that service. I do apologize for the issues and from here on these issues should not occur again. Although in the process of bettering member experience, some things were not able to be fully tested until in production due to the nature of the transfer. I do hope that these changes will better everyone's experience while using VATPAC services and look forward to the possibilities it brings. 3 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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