Partners may need to disable an appliance or set of appliances to perform maintenance at their site. You can disable appliances immediately or you can schedule appliances to be disabled up to 3 months in the future. In either case, the process of disabling a site or appliance can take up to 2 hours, so plan accordingly.
Follow the steps described here to minimize any disruption to customers.
In this article:
- Before you start
- Site maintenance vs. Appliance maintenance
- Disabling an appliance or site
- Re-enabling an appliance or site
- More information about serving status
View the following video on disabling an appliance for maintenance:
Before you start
Read and follow the partner maintenance guidelines in this article: OCA Maintenance Policies.
Important: The only time you can safely disconnect or power down an appliance is when it is in the “Drained” state. If you disconnect or power down appliances that are serving live traffic, customer quality of experience might be negatively impacted.
Site maintenance vs. Appliance maintenance
Initiating maintenance at the site level allows you to disable or schedule multiple appliances for maintenance at once. On the Maintenance tab for a site, you see a list of the appliances that will be impacted by the action. If you are scheduling maintenance for a future date, all appliances currently in the site will have the maintenance schedule applied to them. If you add more appliances to the site before the maintenance window begins, you will need to schedule them for maintenance separately.
You can schedule a future maintenance window on any appliance, regardless of its current state. If the appliance is live and serving traffic when the maintenance window starts, it will begin the draining process.
Disabling an appliance or site
In the Partner Portal, navigate to a site or OCA and click the Maintenance tab.
To begin the disabling process immediately, select a duration for the maintenance window and click Activate maintenance.
To schedule appliances for future maintenance, choose a start date and time for the maintenance window, select a duration for the maintenance window, and click Schedule Maintenance.
If an appliance is serving traffic when the maintenance window starts, it will begin the draining process and the serving state will change to “Draining”. During the draining process, the appliance will continue to serve its current clients, but the control plane services will not send any new traffic to the appliance. Over a period of approximately 2 hours, traffic will continue to decrease and will eventually fully drain, at which point the serving state will change to “Drained”.
Re-enabling an appliance or site
At any point if you need to reverse the process, you can do so on the Maintenance tab. You can also add additional time to the maintenance window if needed.
Disabled appliances will automatically re-enable themselves after the maintenance window is over. The time indicated in the Partner Portal is an approximation, and the actual time that the appliance is re-enabled might differ by up to 15-20 minutes due to the time it takes to propagate state and configuration changes throughout our systems. In addition, as described below, only when an appliance is able to serve traffic will it begin to do so. Therefore, you might see an appliance in the “Enabled” state that is not yet serving traffic.
If you want to more permanently prevent an appliance from serving traffic, you can do so via BGP announcements to the appliance.
More information about serving status
You can see the current serving status for an appliance in the list of appliances for a site, or on the details page for an OCA. You can also see whether the appliance is enabled or disabled from serving traffic on the partner end. It is important to understand these serving states and how the process of disabling an appliance works.
There is an important distinction between an appliance being enabled on the partner end to serve traffic and the appliance actually serving traffic. Because appliances can potentially be drained or disabled either by partners or by Netflix, or can be in problematic states that do not allow them to serve traffic, you should always refer to the serving status flags to understand the actual serving state (Serving, Draining, or Drained).