After months of preparation, the EU-1 primary mirror has successfully migrated from its legacy hosting to a new high-capacity data center in Frankfurt, Germany. The deployment achieved zero downtime through a carefully orchestrated blue-green cutover process, delivering 38% lower latency for European users while maintaining 100% circuit availability across all endpoints.
This migration represents a major infrastructure upgrade that eliminates single points of failure in the EU region, provides 10Gbps+ backbone connectivity, and positions the platform for significantly higher traffic volumes without performance degradation. All existing onion addresses remain unchanged—users experience only the improved performance.
Performance Comparison
| Metric | Legacy EU | Frankfurt | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| TTFB (avg) | 3.4s | 2.1s | −38% |
| Peak Throughput | 2.5 Gbps | 12 Gbps | +380% |
| Circuit Health | 98.2% | 100% | +1.8% |
| Downtime | - | 0min | 100% |
Deployment Timeline
T-48h: Shadow Mode
Frankfurt mirror receives 10% shadow traffic while staying read-only. PostgreSQL streaming replication keeps data synchronized.
T-2h: DNS Prep
DNS TTL reduced to 60s across all providers. Health checks confirm 100% circuit readiness on new endpoint.
T=0: Cutover
Live DNS switch. Traffic converges within 4 minutes. Legacy EU mirror taken offline after confirmation.
T+1h: Validation
Synthetic load tests + live monitoring confirm all performance targets met. Rollback capability decommissioned.
Technical Implementation
Blue-Green Architecture
The migration followed strict blue-green principles with two identical production environments. The Frankfurt cluster (green) ran in shadow mode for 48 hours, processing 10% of live read traffic while the legacy environment (blue) handled production. PostgreSQL streaming replication with WAL shipping ensured zero data loss during the transition period.
Network Optimization
Frankfurt provides direct peering with DE-CIX (Europe's largest internet exchange), eliminating transatlantic backhaul latency that plagued the previous hosting arrangement. The new 10Gbps+ backbone capacity supports 5x current peak traffic without saturation, with headroom for future growth.
Automated Validation
deployment_sequence = [
"reduce_dns_ttl(60s)",
"shadow_traffic(new_mirror, 10%)",
"monitor_replication_lag(<1s)",
"health_check_all_circuits()",
"update_dns_records()",
"validate_traffic_convergence(5min)",
"decommission_legacy()"
]
Monitoring & Rollback
Custom Grafana dashboards tracked 47 key metrics during cutover including replication lag, circuit health, TTFB distribution, and error rates. Automated rollback triggers were armed throughout the process—none were needed as all targets exceeded expectations within 4 minutes of DNS propagation.