In late August, we announced that we are moving to a new cloud provider in September. We’re moving to ensure that we continue to deliver a fast, stable experience as we grow, enabling you to feel confident that you can always run and edit your apps.
We have spent a few weeks setting up Calcapp on Google Cloud, meaning that Calcapp is running both on servers provided by our old cloud provider and on servers run by Google. Currently, when you access Calcapp Creator, Calcapp Connect and your shared apps, you access servers run by our old cloud provider. On September 30, we’ll make the switch, which means that creator.calcapp.net and connect.calcapp.net will then take you to the servers run by Google.
Calcapp is primarily used for line-of-business apps, meaning that apps are accessed a lot more frequently on weekdays than on weekends. By doing this on a Saturday, we hope to minimize any disruption the move may cause. If you regularly change apps on the weekend so that your users have access to updated data Monday morning, please make these changes on September 29.
The problem is that making the switch isn’t an instantaneous process. It involves asking core parts of the Internet infrastructure to point to the new servers instead of the old servers, and that process takes time. There are essentially lots of computers located all over the world (DNS name servers) which need to update their directory information and serve it to you.
This isn’t a problem for running apps. If you try to run an app just before we make the switch, the app will be served by the old server. If you try to run an app half an hour after we make the switch, chances are that your computer or mobile device will still interact with the old server. If you access an app five hours after we have made the switch, though, your local name server will probably have updated its information and our new server will serve you your app. For running apps, all this should thus be seamless. We will have done our job if you don’t notice that anything is different.
Editing apps using Calcapp Creator is a different matter altogether. When we make the switch, we’ll copy all your apps from the old server to the new server. To prevent you from making changes to apps that would be lost once you’re transitioned over to the new server, we won’t allow you to change apps if you reach the old server when the new server is up and running. Any attempt to change your apps or creating new ones will result in this error message:
If you see this message, try reloading Calcapp Creator a short while later. Within an hour, you should be taken to Calcapp Creator running on a new server, which will allow you to modify your apps.
All this is assuming that we don’t encounter unexpected issues. We will run simulations well before September 30 to try to ensure that the transition is smooth, but unexpected things do happen. This blog will remain accessible no matter what (we’ll transition it to a new server later), so remember to check back if you encounter any issues for updated information.
PS. We have taken this opportunity to move all servers to a new technology named HTTP/2. This primarily makes pages load faster. Calcapp Creator, Calcapp Connect and shared apps will load faster, but won’t run faster once they’re running. Our main website, though, will become noticeably speedier, especially on pages with many images (which will be much more likely to load in parallel instead of one after another).