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  13/09/2022  

Europa IT platform

Notification service
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Planned maintenance
Maintenance impacting cloud sites on 19 September

Sites hosted in DIGIT Drupal cloud infrastructure (AWS) might be impacted by the upgrade of Web Linux hosts taking place on 19 September from 19.00 to 23.00.

During that time frame:

  • Each site might be down for five minutes.
  • It is recommended not to launch any deployment.
Maintenance impacting deployments on 22 September

The Drupal infrastructure related with deployments will be in maintenance mode on 22 September from 6.00 to 8.00 AM due to a version upgrade of Gitlab.


The expected impact during that time frame is:

  • No deployments will be possible on Gitlab and Drone
  • Unavailability of access to Gitlab services
Service procedures and guidelines
Drupal Hosting - general approach to EOL Drupal versions
With the Drupal community going in a more flexible and faster release timing for new versions, it is important to clarify the process applied by DIGIT Drupal Hosting Service in the management of unsupported versions.

The process has five phases:

  • Phase 1: 90 days before EOL
    Communication on the end of life for the Drupal version.
  • Phase 2: 14 days before EOL
    Activation of a blocker in the CI/CD 14 days before the version is marked as unsupported by Drupal.org. This block is automatically generated from the constraint encoded in the Quality Assurance website. Manual bypass is possible on-demand for business needs, if approved by a DIGIT. D1.004 official.
  • Phase 3: EOL
    End of life Drupal version, meaning the date when Drupal.org marks the version as unsupported.
  • Phase 4: 90 days after EOL
    Application of business restrictions 90 days after EOL to the non-compliant projects. We will block the authentication to any request from outside the trusted network (EC). Some additional restrictions can be imposed depending on the project and issue nature. A shorter period can be configured based on security vulnerabilities that would appear for newer versions.
  • Phase 5: 180 days after EOL
    180 days after EOL, the website will be moved into a “static version”. DIGIT does not guarantee the functionality of the website as it is likely that some features of the website are lost in the process of static HTML conversion.

The timeframe mentioned in the previous phases can be shortened if security vulnerabilities in newer versions are detected.
This is the newsletter of the Europa IT platform services managed by DG DIGIT.D1. It provides technical information to professionals involved in the creation and/or management of public information websites hosted under the europa.eu domain, in particular, those websites using the Europa Web Publishing Platform or Open Europa (based on Drupal technology) and related Webtools services.

The information on this newsletter does not require any action from owners of sites built with the Europa Web Publishing Platform. As product owner, DG COMM will contact those site owners for action when necessary.

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