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Prepare services for high load

Prepare your services for higher than usual traffic to avoid service outages.

Monitor service health​

Subscribe for service notifications​

To receive notifications about the service health, you can set the appropriate emails in Aiven Console:

  1. Go to your project, and select Settings from the sidebar.
  2. In the Settings page, include relevant email addresses in the Technical Emails section.

The specified email addresses will receive notifications related to plan size change, performance, outages and upcoming maintenance.

warning

If no technical emails are specified, Aiven sends some high priority messages to the project admins.

Therefore, if some technical support members are not admins, they might be missing important notifications for your services.

Subscribe to platform status updates​

The Aiven services are managed by the Aiven platform, therefore is a good idea to check its status and receive notifications in case of platform wide incidents. You can follow the RSS feed, subscribe for email or SMS notifications, or use the Slack integration to get notified where your team is already.

You can check the status of the the Aiven platform and subscribe to updates on incidents directly from status.Aiven.io.

Monitor the services​

Monitoring helps you prepare for high load, see Monitoring services.

Modify the service plan​

If you forecast a load that can't be handled by the current service plan, you can decide either to scale up your service plan, or request a custom plan if none of the available plans satisfies your requirements.

Define the backups schedule​

To minimize the impact of the higher load during the backup process, it is recommended to schedule backups outside of peak traffic hours.

To configure the daily backup time in Aiven for PostgreSQL® and Aiven for MySQL® services:

  1. Access the Aiven Console <https://console.aiven.io/>, select your project and choose your service.

  2. In the service page, select Service settings from the sidebar, and scroll down to the Advanced configuration section.

  3. Click Configure.

  4. In the Advanced configuration dialog, configure the values for these variables:

    • backup_hour: The hour of the day when the backup starts.
    • backup_minute: The minute of the hour to begin the backup.
tip

If you intend to make a plan upgrade, we recommend you do it immediately after a full backup. This reduces the amount of incremental changes that need to be applied on top of the base backup and therefore speeds up the upgrade itself.

Define the maintenance schedule​

Similar to backups, it is important to make sure your maintenance windows are configured correctly.

tip

Plan maintenance updates outside of your peak traffic hours and days. Optional updates will not be automatically installed unless you apply them yourself or a mandatory update is created.

Run load test on service forks​

To test the impact of high traffic on a production service, fork the service to test and run your load test on the fork.

Perform service specific optimizations​

Optimizing a service allows it to perform better under stress therefore avoiding the need of an upgrade. The more optimized a service is for your usage, the better you can weather spikes in traffic.