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Downtime alert: Neotoma transition to AWS in January

We are in the process of moving the Neotoma Paleoecology Database from legacy servers at Penn State University to Amazon Web Services. This has been a huge effort, and the Neotoma IT team has done a fantastic job preparing for this transition. Many thanks especially to Simon Goring and Steve Crawford for their work.

We would like to take the slower holiday season to complete the transition, which means that some or all services associated with the Neotoma database will experience at least some down time. We plan to complete the work in two phases:

  • January 1-5, services will be shut down for the transition. In particular, we will take down the Tilia webservices completely to prevent any unintended uploads. Other services may be up or down periodically, but this will not be reliable or predictable in this first week.
  • January 8-12, we will restore services but this will be a time of troubleshooting, so there may be intermittent outages.

We know that folks all work on different schedules and our aim is to minimize disruptions. In particular, if you are planning a large work effort during either of these two windows (Jan 1-5, Jan 8-12), such as hosting a workshop or a classroom exercise, please email the Neotoma team (Simon Goring <sgoring@wisc.edu>, Jessica Blois <jblois@ucmerced.edu>, and/or Jack Williams <jwwilliams1@wisc.edu>), or message us on Slack, to let us know your plans.

Posted December 22, 2023 by Jessica Blois