Browshot blog

Update: the upgrade has been canceled.

We have scheduled an upgrade of Browshot on Saturday February 7th, 2015 at 8:30pm PST until 10:30pm PST. We expect about no more than 30 minutes of downtime. During this time, the website and the API may return errors.

This is the last step in upgrading our database to a cluster of 3 database servers.

We will post updates on this post during the maintenance window.

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We have set up two external websites:

• http://status.browshot.com/: check the status of the Browshot website and API. You can subscribe to the RSS feed and e-mail alerts to get notified about outages and scheduled maintenance. This website is updated manually.
• http://uptime.browshot.com/: detailed up-time of browshot.com and api.browshot.com measured every minute by a third party.

You can find additional information on Browshot's network architecture and monitoring at https://browshot.com/status.

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We have released a new version of the Perl, PHP, Ruby and Python libraries. They work with the latest version of the Browshot API (1.14). All the unit tests are fully working and their documentation have been updated.

All libraries source code is available on github and on their language-specific repository for easier installation:

• Perl: CPAN
• PHP: Packagist (new)
• Python: PyPi
• Ruby: Rubygems

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We have scheduled an upgrade of Browshot on Friday January 16th, 2015 at 8:30pm PST until 11:30pm PST. We expect about 30 minutes of downtime. During this time, the website and the API may return errors.

This is the first step in upgrading our database to a cluster of 3 database servers. Another maintenance window will be scheduled 2 weeks later.

We will post updates on this post during the maintenance window.

Upgrade

• 8:30pm PST: upgrade started, website and API are down.
• 8:45pm PST: database server migrated and restarted.
• 8:54pm PST: website and API are working on 2 core servers. Private instances are unavailable.
• 9:01pm PST: all core servers are running, private instances are available.

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Browshot, like many web applications, uses HTTPS to encrypt your web transaction and to guarantee the legitimacy of our website.

There are man ways to deploy HTTPS. Done wrong, many of the security benefits of the protocol are lost. We continually test our configuration against the latest SSL vulnerabilities reported to ensure a high level of security.

SSL Labs offers an extensive tests of any HTTPS servers. To ensure that we keep our A rating, we have updated all of our web servers on 12/12/2014 to tune our HTTPS settings.

You can check the results on SSL Labs. Note that we use more servers than what SSL Labs reports. The configuration is identical on all of our servers, so the tests should yield the exact same results.

Rating from SSL Labs

We will continue to monitor our HTTPS settings to keep the highest level of security for our customers. We will upgrade our certificate to a SHA2 signature when we renew it in 2015.

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