Manage switchover and data synchronisation between live and alternative

[rija]

User Story

As a website user
I want to not meet downtime whenever a new version of of the GigaDB with infrastructure changes is released
So that I'm not interrupted or delayed when I use GigaDB

Acceptance criteria

Given a release of GigaDB is made involving infrastructure changes
When the infrastructure change are performed
Then there is no visible downtime to website users

Given a release of GigaDB is made involving infrastructure changes
When the infrastructure changes are made
Then it doesn't cause downtime to users of the live bastion users

Additional infos

• Setup on the alternative bastion (bastion-alt.gigadb.host) a daily rclone sync job for keeping user dropboxes in sync between live and alternative #2000
• Update the cronjobs scripts (userdropbox cron from previous story and databaseReset) to be active only if the domain of the server they are running on don't match GIGADB_ENVIRONMENT=live and GITLAB_PROJECT_NAME=gigascience/upstream/gigadb-website #2001
• Devise and document switchover protocol based on pointing live domains (gigadb.org and bastion.gigadb.host) to the alternative infrastructure and vice versa (web-alt.gigadb.host and bastion-alt.gigadb.host to point to the former live infrastructure) #2002

Question: What if a deployment includes new data with regard to the data sync on alternative of live data?

Pre-requisite:

• Have gigadb.org's DNS server is moved to Clouflare

[rija]

Hi @pli888,

Please note the pre-requisite here, we need to be using Cloudflare as the DNS server for the gigadb.org domain.
We don't need to transfer domain. We just need to tell Alibaba Registry we use Clouflare as the DNS server by setting up Alibba registry records with the two name servers address Cloudflare will generate when we add new domain to Cloudflare DNS configuration.