To ensure the security and performance of Acquia products and services, Acquia conducts regular maintenance adhering to the standards defined in Shared Responsibility model.
Maintenance processes
Acquia uses the following processes for maintenance:
| Process | Description |
| Platform-wide | Maintenance that is rolled out to the entire platform either simultaneously or on a region-by-region basis. This is a required maintenance delivered to all products or services across the platform. This process cannot accommodate customer scheduling requests. |
| Product/service specific | Maintenance that is specific to an individual Acquia product or service. This maintenance process is unique to the type of product or service being updated, such as module updates, software upgrades, and product version upgrades. This process may accommodate customer scheduling requests depending on the product or service. |
| Individual customer scheduling | Maintenance that is specific to an individual customer application or instance. This maintenance is unique to the customer and does not impact a larger platform, or product or service audience. This process can often accommodate customer scheduling requests. |
Types of maintenance
Note
Acquia makes every reasonable effort to limit communications to customers directly affected by an issue. Depending on the scope and urgency, we may choose to use several communication channels to reach our customers promptly.
Acquia notifies customers about the following types of events:
| Type of maintenance | Scheduling period | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled maintenance | Between 11:00 PM and 7:00 AM local time | Planned maintenance to ensure the security or performance of your application. Acquia typically notifies about this maintenance through email communication and might also send maintenance notices as a ticket. To reduce the impact to you and your website visitors, Acquia aims to schedule the maintenance between 11:00 PM and 7:00 AM local time in your hosting region. |
| Unscheduled maintenance | Begins when a security issue is announced or if your instance becomes impaired and requires maintenance | Urgent maintenance to ensure the security or performance of your application.
For some unscheduled maintenance events such as critical security events, Acquia works to resolve the issue and notifies you promptly. |
| Product changes or improvements | Scheduled 30 to 90 days in advance | Product changes or improvements to:
These changes are typically scheduled 30 to 90 days in advance to ensure that the customers have enough time to make the required changes to take advantage of new developments. |
| End-of-life (EOL) campaigns | Timing of the changes are scheduled to allow customers enough time to make any necessary changes to their applications | EOL campaigns to ensure that all components of Acquia products, product features, and other Acquia services remain secure, supported, and up-to-date. Obsolete platform components may impact website performance or security and may require changes to subscriber applications. These campaigns typically span 3 to 6 months so that Acquia gets time to work with customers to ensure minimal application impact. The timing of the changes are scheduled so that customers get enough time to make any necessary changes to their applications. During EOL campaigns, Acquia contacts customers several times through various communication channels, such as an announcement on our Software end-of-life schedule, pages in the Acquia Docs and knowledge base, email notices, Support tickets, and direct outreach from an Account Manager, Technical Account Manager, or Acquia Support. |
Acquia communication channels
For customer communication, Acquia uses the following communication channels:
| Channel | Description |
|---|---|
| Sending notifications through emails. | |
| In product messaging (IPM) | Sending notifications through product. |
| Acquia Status | Posting updates about outages and availability at status.acquia.com. Customers must sign up and subscribe to the platform-wide issues for the products specific to their Acquia subscription. |
| Support tickets | Sending notifications through Support tickets. By default, all new Support tickets copy customers with the Include as a collaborator on all tickets by default permission. To provide a new role to a team member or to edit a role to assign permissions, see Working with roles and permissions. |
| EOL calendar | Publishing the end-of-life dates for Acquia’s products on the Software end-of-life schedule. |
Based on the nature and urgency of the message, Acquia may either use one particular channel or multiple channels in conjunction.