Best Practices After Reboot.

Reboot Survival – Best Practices

Introduction

Although cloud infrastructure offers resilience, all servers depend on their physical hardware, which requires maintenance in the long run. Servers that operate around the clock depend on uptime for optimal usage, but unavoidable downtime does occur. In addition to hardware maintenance, updates and patches require server reboots to keep systems secure and up-to-date. The guide below outlines best practices for ensuring that your system can handle unexpected reboots and minimize downtime.

Test your Instanceby Manual Reboot

During the development phase, it is important to reboot your server after making significant changes to your instance. This will ensure that your Instance is fully operational and free of issues. By regularly performing this reboot trial, you will be better prepared for unexpected reboots that may occur during maintenance or upgrades.

Backup your Crucial Data

Backing up your most important and critical data is a crucial step. Losing data due to unexpected downtime or accidental deletion can have a severe impact on your instance. NeevCloud CDP Backups serve as an exact replica of your file system, automatically backed up at regular intervals. Each backup contains all the data from the initial provisioning to the most recent block update, allowing for point-in-time restoration from any recovery point in the archive.

You can also back up your databases from MySQL or MariaDB and restore them by using "mysqldump" Command.

Enable Services on Boot

It is also important to ensure that all critical and important services and applications configured on your server are set to start automatically at boot. This way, during future reboots, all services will be up and running without the need for manual intervention

In Debian and Ubuntu, Use update-rc.d to add or remove services from startup

sudo update-rc.d service_name defaults

To remove service from boot startup, Use the below command

sudo update-rc.d -f service_name  remove

In Centos7, Use systemctl command

sudo systemctl enable service_name

sudo systemctl disable service_name

Ensure Firewall rules are saved

If you have manually configured the rules in the firewall, You should make sure it's already saved and gets loaded on boot automatically. in order to allow

You can save the firewalls permanently by running the below command.

sudo iptables-save > /etc/iptables.firewall.rules

Enable similar rules in the external firewall

Once you have the settings saved on Firewall on your server make sure you have enabled

you can go to your instance select Settings >> Firewall >> ADD A FIREWALL RULE

Note: Adding a firewall rule will also add a port forwarding rule with the same port and protocol. Deleting the firewall rule will not remove its corresponding port forwarding rule.

Using Load balancer

If your system totally cannot afford downtime, You can use a Load Balancer Appliance which helps you to dynamically distribute user traffic to multiple backend nodes — for high availability, scalability, fault-tolerance, and smooth user experience. It also helps you to apply changes to the backend without impacting the end-user experience.