Requirement: The repository shall have procedures in place to evaluate when changes are needed to current hardware.

This is necessary to ensure that the repository has the capacity to make informed and timely decisions when information indicates the need for new hardware.

Evaluation procedures in place; documented staff expertise in each technology subsystem.

Given information from technology watches or other technology monitoring notification systems, the repository should have procedures and expertise to evaluate this data and make sound decisions regarding the need for new hardware. The objective is to track when technology providers have developed subsystems that minimize risk, or that minimize cost, or that improve performance. This is necessary to track emerging technologies and plan for upgrades before capacity limits occur. The evaluation should identify when the risk of using new technology outweighs the expected benefit, and when the new technology is sufficiently mature to minimize risk.

The choice of PaaS pushes such decisions to AWS for physical and logical hardware assets. For infrastructure monitored and managed by APTrust, evaluation is the result of multiple team members reviewing the data provided by monitoring. Both the Lead Software engineer and the Lead DevOps engineer will generally be involved. The work related to the decision and testing will normally be captured in a ticket in Trello, until the change is implemented.

AWS also provides tools such as Cost Explorer and Security Hub which may give resourcing recommendations, and are reviewed routinely by APTrust staff. 

https://trello.com/c/pyu0ah3R/733-upgrade-postgres-96-to-postgres-12-os-for-pharos-dbs

Not sure if we’re using this, but we got an EOL notice from Amazon about this instance.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 9.6 End-of-Life date is January 18, 2022

Amazon RDS is starting the end of life (EOL) process for PostgreSQL major version 9.6. We are doing this because the PostgreSQL community is planning to discontinue support for PostgreSQL 9.6 on November 11, 2021

If you do not upgrade your databases before January 18, 2022, RDS will upgrade your PostgreSQL 9.6 databases to 12 during a scheduled maintenance window between January 18, 2022 00:00:01 UTC and February 22, 2022 00:00:01 UTC. On February 22, 2022 00:00:01 AM UTC, any PostgreSQL 9.6 databases that remain will be upgraded to version 12 regardless of whether the instances are in a maintenance window or not.

We recommend that you first upgrade to minor version 9.6.20 or greater and then upgrade directly to PostgreSQL 12 or greater so that you can skip intermediate major versions.

This impacts both Pharos Demo and Pharos Production and Replica in Oregon.