2024-12-12
Yesterday, I fulfilled the primary Three Rings objective I set for myself when I kicked off my sabbatical twelve weeks ago and migrated the entire application to a new hosting provider (making a stack of related improvements along the way).
I did some work on this project during my Three Rings-focussed International Volunteer Day last week, but it feels like I've been working on it for much longer than that. And it feels like it... because I have been.
Months prior, I was comparing different providers and their relative merits, making sure that our (quirky and specific) needs could be met. Weeks beforehand, I was running a "dry run" every four or five days, streamlining the process of moving the ~450GB [1] of live data while minimising downtime. Days before the event felt like the countdown for a rocket launch, with final preparations underway: reducing DNS time-to-lives, ensuring users knew about our downtime window, and generally fitting in a little time to panic.
It's challenging to pull off a "big", intensive operation like this in an entirely voluntary operation. I'm not saying I couldn't have done it were I not on sabbatical, but it'd certainly have been harder and riskier.
But then, I also couldn't have done it without the kickass team of volunteers I've surrounded myself with. I guess the real success story here is in the power of a well-aligned team and in volunteer effort.
[1] Three Rings' user data is represented by a little under 70GB of MariaDB databases plus about 380GB of organisational storage: volunteer photos, files, email attachments, and the like. Certainly not massive by comparison to, say, social media sites, search engines, and larger eCommerce platforms... but large enough that moving it takes a little planning!