[falcolas]

A nice writeup of a neat (if risky) upgrade.

> static IPs

FWIW, I personally love Virtual IPs (VIPs) for this (basically, an existing network interface advertises serving more than one IP, and can change that IP dynamically between servers with an arp call). The downside is that there are a lot of cloud providers who don't support externally available VIPs. They do, however, offer their own nearly-identical solution (such as Elastic IPs from Amazon).

The use of VIPs or similar could have potentially avoided the need for such a risky upgrade, potentially also saving millions of dollars in the process. Of course, I could simply be missing some hidden requirement from customers that they couldn't use VIPs but that's pretty uncommon, even in the finance industry.

[Tijdreiziger]

That's addressed in the article: "We purposely don’t employ dynamic IPs to retain multi-cloud deployment capabilities and prevent vendor lock-in with one platform."

[luhn]

I was really confused by this. Cloud vendors are not bring-your-own-IP AFAIK, how can they even get a non-virtual static IP addresses on the cloud?

[FuckOffNeemo]

Why not have the machines presented to the clients or other interfaces by a virtual IP from an application delivery controller such as F5's BigIP or similar? And then remove the dependency on static NIC's on a virtual appliance?

Seems counter intuitive to run virtual appliances on static addresses if it can be avoided.

[sitharus]

That still makes no sense. AWS and DigitalOcean both allow for static IP addresses that can be migrated between instances. There's no reason for crazy in-place upgrades.

[falcolas]

I'd hazard a guess that the cost of moving IPs would severely outweigh the cost of switching VIP implementations, in terms of preventing a move across providers.