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Beta notice for host maintenance policies

The user-definable host maintenance policy setting has been launched as part of an open beta. During the beta period, not all planned maintenance events may respect your selected preference.

During the lifecycle of most cloud-based virtual machines, such as Linodes, it's often necessary for maintenance events to be performed by the service provider. At Akamai, host upgrades and other types of planned maintenance events are crucial for maintaining our cloud infrastructure's security, performance, and compliance. Our goal is to maintain our fleet while minimizing any impact to our customers.

Types of maintenance events

• Planned (scheduled) maintenance: Host upgrades and other types of necessary maintenance events are scheduled in advance. When these events are customer-impacting, a timeline is communicated to customers so that they can prepare and, if needed, make any needed adjustments to their workloads or applications.
• Emergency maintenance: In rarer circumstances, issues may arise with the underlying host or infrastructure that necessitates emergency maintenance. In these cases, swift action will be taken to minimize downtime experienced by Linodes and correct the underlying issue. Affected customers will be notified of the emergency maintenance event shortly after we become aware of the issue and will be kept apprised of any action taken on their Linode(s).

Maintenance policies

During most planned maintenance events, the maintenance can be performed while the Linode is still running. For some workloads, you may prefer that your VM is instead powered off during maintenance. You can define your preference as part of the Maintenance policy setting, which can be set on the account-level (the default for new Linodes) and on each individual Linode. The following policy options are available:

• Migrate: Recommended for maximizing availability. Migrates the Linode to a new host while it is still running. During the migration, the instance remains fully operational, though there is a temporary performance impact. For most maintenance events and Linode types, no reboot is required after the migration completes. If a reboot is required, it is automatically performed. This method employs live migrations for most Linode plans, though warm migrations will be used in some cases, such as for GPU plans. If your Linode is in a powered off state before the maintenance begins, the system will fall back to the power off / power on method.
• Power off / power on: Recommended for maximizing performance. Powers off the Linode at the start of the maintenance event and reboots it once the maintenance finishes. While your Linode is powered off, any workloads running on it exclusively will experience downtime. Downtime can be mitigating by employing a high availability application architecture. Depending on the maintenance event and Linode type, the Linode may or may not remain on the same host. Do not select this option for Linode that are used for container orchestration solutions like Kubernetes. This method includes both cold migrations and in-place upgrades.

The selected maintenance policy setting is used (whenever possible) during a planned maintenance event. During some maintenance events, it may not be possible to perform a migration in which your Linode remains operational. In these cases, the system will fall-back to the power off / power on method and your Linode will experience some amount of downtime.

To learn more about migration methods employed on the Akamai Cloud platform, see Migrations within Akamai Cloud.

Set the maintenance policy

Account-wide setting

To set the default policy for new Linode, you can adjust the account-wide Maintenance policy setting. Within Cloud Manager, this setting is available under the Account section within the Settings tab. Adjusting your preference here does not impact the maintenance policy setting on your existing Linode.

Individual Linode setting

The Maintenance policy setting for a Linode can be defined when deploying a new Linode or modifying an existing Linode. Within Cloud Manager, this setting is visible in both the Create Linode form and in the Settings tab when viewing an existing Linode.