DigitalOcean Kubernetes: new control plane is faster and free, enable HA for 99.95% uptime SLA

Question

Redirecting inbound traffic to backup/snapshot droplet

I want to upgrade my droplet from Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04. I know that the first steps are to create a snapshot and then create a new droplet from the snapshot.

To get inbound traffic to the backup droplet while the main droplet is updating, is it as simple as changing the A record for the domain to use the IP of the backup? Can I assume that the backup droplet will be fully functioning as soon as it’s created? Will changing the IP on the A record create significant downtime?

Submit an answer

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Want to learn more? Join the DigitalOcean Community!

Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in Q&A, subscribe to topics of interest, and get courses and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business.

Sign up now

Bobby Iliev • July 26, 2021

Hello,

To avoid any downtime, what you could do is:

  • Create the backup Droplet from a snapshot
  • Before changing your A record make sure to fully test your website, you could do that by updating your local hosts file so that your PC would load the site from the secondary server rather than your main one.
  • Once you’ve fully tested the site, you could then point the A record of your domina name to the new Droplet’s IP
  • Then wait 12/24 hours to make sure that the DNS cache has cleared around the Globe
  • Finally you could proceed with the upgrade as you mentioned

One thing to keep in mind is the database, as if you are making some changes to your site, they would be preserved on the new Droplet, so you might have to carry them over to the old one once the upgrade has been completed.

Regards, Bobby

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $100 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up