Feb 12, 2024
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Over the weekend we moved all of our infrastructure to Amazon Web Services. The results have been really positive - we managed to move all of our live client data between different physical datacenters without any data loss and we're now up and running in a wholly new environment with a lot more scalability, performance and headroom.
Update 1: The API is now back online and functioning normally.
Update 2: The email gateway functionality is now back online and functioning normally; we are still working with Amazon on getting Port 587 open on your own domain; Port 25 is working happily, however.
Update 3: Xero is now working properly again.
Update 4: While the code that runs Xero has been updated as part of our upgrade to AWS, a new problem of performance lag and timeouts has emerged. Our engineers are working with the Xero engineers to get to the source of the problem. Until it is solved, the time to reconnect to Xero will be longer than usual; if you get a "white screen" on reconnection pop-up window, close the pop-up window, reload the Integrations screen, and if the Xero tab still shows your account as disconnected, click on Connect again and go through the process. In our testing it works about 50% of the time.
We're currently seeing performance improvements of between 20% and 40% in speeds of page loads and transtions. While these will vary for users depending on their own internet connections and conditions on the public internet, we're confident that you'll be seeing the benefits of this performance, if not now, certainly into the future because of our ability to scale much more effortlessly.
We'd love to hear your thoughts/experiences with the new Accelo infrastructure; feel free to leave a comment below!
One of the big benefits of moving to AWS is the much easier path of scalability. We've rationalized our host server roles (which has introduced its own challenges; see below), which also makes it a lot easier for us to scale out horizontally. We our traffic and use up by 30% month on month in January, the ability to much more easily add/clone hosts in the real cloud now we're with AWS means we'll be able to much more easily respond to demand and load in real time.
At the time of writing (mid-Monday Australian time, early morning Europe, and Sunday evening US time) there are still a number of outstanding things to be worked out post migration. Here's a summary as well as some work-arounds as required.
For our users who use Accelo as the outgoing email gateway, one of the challenges we haven't yet overcome is the ability to connect and route your email via our servers using your existing configuration details. We're confident that we'll be able to have this resolved in the next 24 hours (the problem relates to Amazon's available port options), but in the interim, you can make the following change to your outgoing email server settings and have emails delivered properly.
While the outgoing email sending mechanisms are almost back to normal, we currently have different options in play depending on which port you want/need to use.
Port 25 (standard)
Port 587 (for cases where your ISP blocks Port 25)
We're sorry for the inconvenience caused by this change in access details; we're working with AWS engineering at the moment to arrange for an exception for the port details we need through their load balancing systems, after which point you'll be able to revert to using your Accelo hostname for outgoing email sending.
One of the unexpected consequences of this upgrade is that our API service (which was more advanced than our core systems previously, using later versions of libraries and modules) needed to be reconfigured to fit in with a more rationalised set of servers and libraries.
Our engineering team is working on bringing back API access currently; we'd expect it will be back and running within 24 hours. Again, apologies for any inconvenience.
The Xero API uses a very perculiar set of HTTP authentication and encryption standards; one of the aspects that we didn't anticipate in this upgrade process was that our new versions and setup would have problems fitting in with the Xero API. We're working on getting to the bottom of it now, and will provide an update and an ETA when we know more.
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