- Partner Maintenance
- Unplanned Outages or Service-Impacting Events
- Potential Service-impacting Maintenance
Partner Maintenance
The only OCA components that Netflix will request partners to replace in the field are:
- Power supplies
- Optics
We will ship these components to you in case of failure. Netflix will not request any ISP partner to install or replace any internal OCA hardware components such as memory, hard drives, or fans. Note that OCAs are designed to operate in data center environments with high-capacity fans that are required to cool the dense disk and memory installed. You might notice loud fan noise from OCAs, which is normal.
For ISP partners who are engaging in maintenance that might impact Netflix OCA availability, please observe the following guidelines:
- Plan your maintenance or downtime to occur during the scheduled fill window in order to minimize service disruption to our shared subscribers.
- You can disable and drain appliances from the Open Connect Partner Portal following these instructions: Draining and disabling appliances
- You can also use the Partner Portal to schedule maintenance in advance.
- Plan to drain appliances of traffic 2 to 3 hours in advance of disconnecting or powering down appliances, so that clients currently being served by the appliance will finish by the start of the maintenance period and new client playback requests are properly directed to an alternate source. This helps to ensure that clients do not need to switch away to a different source mid-stream, which can cause viewing disruptions.
- After completion of maintenance, ensure that the OCAs are re-enabled to serve traffic. This will redirect new session starts away from the alternate sources.
- If you intend to make any physical changes to a site that contains multiple OCAs in a cluster (physically moving OCAs, etc), you must notify the Open Connect team so that the cluster can be reconfigured properly. For more details, see: Moving an OCA
Unplanned Outages or Service-Impacting Events
For service-wide outages with broad impact to the service of multiple OCA partners, partners might receive an initial notification, status updates on a regular basis if the outage is prolonged, and a final resolution notification. If you want to filter these announcements, the sender address is: cdn-noc@mailer.netflix.com.
For per-ISP partner incidents, including routing and connectivity anomalies that persist over a significant period of time, the Netflix operations team will be alerted by our internal monitoring tools. We will resolve any issues under our control as soon as reasonably possible. If there is an issue that requires partner assistance, we will open a ticket to you.
Potential Service-impacting Maintenance
Whenever possible, for any planned maintenance or activity that might adversely impact an OCA or the services that it provides, Netflix will communicate according to the following schedule:
- Netflix will send an email at the start of any maintenance activity.
- Netflix will send another email when the maintenance activity is completed, to signal the return to a normal operational state.
For emergency service activities that do not permit our standard advance period, we will notify as early as possible.
During scheduled and emergency Netflix maintenance windows, ISP partners might see their BGP session flap, notice a link-state change with their cache-connected interfaces, and see traffic served from the appliance decrease or go to zero. All of these events are expected.
Under normal conditions, software updates that are not service-impacting will occur during the fill window at a time of low traffic, thereby minimizing potential user impact.