Changing Rackspace Cloud Instance Sizes

Following on from my post about the actual costs of using Rackspace, this article is about the "Actual downtime of changing the size of a Rackspace cloud server".

I wanted to go from a 10Gb disk to 20Gb disk. I got confused by the interface and accidentally went from 10Gb to 40Gb. So I then also got to try downsizing from 40Gb to 20Gb!

Q1. Does my IP address change? Do I need a new SSH key?
A. No and No.

Q2. How long does it take?
A. The 40Gb to 20Gb downsize took 13 minutes in total. The 10Gb to 40Gb upsize was about the same or slightly quicker. If you like to be careful and take a disk image beforehand, that takes about another 10-15 minutes (for about 9Gb, so allow more if your disk is bigger).

Q3. How much downtime?
A. At least 30 seconds... Prior to the move I saw activity in one program at 06:28:27; the new server was fully running at 06:29:05-ish, and the first new activity in that program was at 06:30:03.

The reason for the almost 60 second delay in that particular program was it gets started from a monitoring script (that I wrote) that runs on a 1-minute cronjob. The cron job didn't run at 06:29:00, so had to wait until 06:30:00. If I had started my program from the init.d scripts, or even from rc.local, the downtime would only have been 30-40 seconds. That is the same downtime you can expect for a webserver.

Q4. Does it depend on the size of the server?
A. I believe so. Bigger servers would have more files to copy.

Q5. Do in-memory caches survive? Do background processes keep running?
A. No and no. The resize implies a reboot. Any background process you'd started manually before needs restarting manually again when the new server comes up. Use /etc/rc.local or cronjobs to auto-start things.

Q6. Do I need to be around when I resize?
A. Yes to get it started. You could then go away (you are supposed to verify it when it comes up, but I think if you don't verify it then after a few hours it assumes you are happy that everything is running smoothly.)  (The point of the verify step is they keep the old image around and can quickly revert - I did not test this to see how quick the revert would be.)

Q7. How do I change server size without any downtime at all?
A. Big question. The glib answer is: If you have to ask, then it is too difficult. The slightly more helpful answer is: if a web server then run two servers, with a load balancer in front of them; if a database server, look into database clusters.