This guide describes the steps needed to get your site ready for Active Disaster Recovery (DR) stacks (applies only to CCL hosted stacks,).
Active DR stacks have the following properties:
- They are load-balanced. The traffic is served from two data centres, increasing the maximum potential capacity of the stack.
- They are highly-available. If one data centre / node exhibits a problem and is not reachable, or emits 5xx HTTP status codes, this node will be pulled out of the pool and all traffic will be redirected to the other data centre.
- Files are synchronised from the ./www/public/assets/ directory but no other directories are synchronised between nodes.
- The databases on each node is synchronised seamlessly by the infrastructure.
Your custom domains will be actively load balanced between the two nodes. *.cwp.govt.nz domains are not load balanced and point to either the Wellington or Auckland node. We supply two domains for Active DR environments for both UAT and PROD to help debug issues:
- stack.cwp.govt.nz - points to Wellington
- stack-dr.cwp.govt.nz - points to Auckland
In other words, we can't make your site highly-available if your production domain is not pointing to Silverstripe Cloud (i.e. your site is not live). Additionally, accessing your site at any time through the "cwp.govt.nz" domain will not exhibit the highly-available property.
The following chapters provide information on the required changes to your code to ensure the site works correctly with Active Disaster Recovery.
Provide an SSL certificate for your primary domain
You will need to provide us with an SSL certificate for your primary domain so HTTPS requests are load-balanced between servers. We can also organise the SSL certificate for you if you prefer.
Shared sessions across servers
If you are running at least version 1.0.4 of the cwp-core module (which is usually installed via the CCL module recipe), shared sessions have already been configured. You can skip this step.
Otherwise, if you are running an earlier version, please follow these steps:
1. Install the Hybrid Sessions module
composer require "silverstripe/hybridsessions:*"2. Configure the module
In your mysite/_config.php file, add this configuration:
// Automatically configure session key for activedr with hybridsessions module
if (Environment::getEnv('CWP_INSTANCE_DR_TYPE')
&& Environment::getEnv('CWP_INSTANCE_DR_TYPE') === 'active'
&& Environment::getEnv('SS_SESSION_KEY')
&& class_exists(HybridSession::class)
) {
HybridSession::init(Environment::getEnv('SS_SESSION_KEY'));
}