Almost… there…: A New, Improved Infrastructure

After a few weeks of intensive engineering and prep, we’re now ready to move Instapaper onto a new, vastly improved back-end infrastructure. We’re starting the cut-over shortly after midnight US ET (4am UTC), and will finish at most a few hours later. We’re moving both production code and large databases, so Instapaper will be down for a bit. We apologize in advance, and we’ll do everything we can to keep the downtime to an absolute minimum.

It’ll be worth it.  The new infrastructure will be significantly more reliable, stable, and scalable.  We’ve been experiencing more and more problems with our increasingly (and sometimes puzzlingly) finicky dedicated machines.  When you look under the hood, Instapaper’s back-end has proven to be an amazing piece of engineering, running smoothly for years on end with minimal human intervention.  But our machines themselves haven’t been keeping up with our needs.  (That’s no knock on our hosting company, by the way;  they’ve been great.).

By moving to a beefier, more redundant cloud-based infrastructure, users should notice that there’s less to notice. In a good way.

This is the first in a long list of Instapaper improvements you’re going to be seeing over the next few months.  We got incredibly useful user input via this blog over the past week, and will post a summary of that and an overview of our roadmap for Instapaper later this week.

Thanks for your patience and support. May The Force be with us.

–andrew