Introducing improved maintenance policy for Cloud Memorystore

Maintenance is a critical component of every database user experience as it ensures that your database is staying up to date with security patches, receiving feature updates, and improving performance. However, maintenance downtime can be impactful, especially when it occurs at inopportune times. 

We are happy to announce that Cloud Memorystore now enables you to have more control over when your Cloud Memorystore for Redis instances undergo routine maintenance. 

What is Cloud Memorystore Maintenance? 

Cloud Memorystore instances undergo periodic maintenance to keep your database performant and secure. These may include operating system patches, minor version upgrades, new features, and more. When this happens, your instance will experience disruptions. The nature of the disruption will vary depending on how you are using the service: 

• Cloud Memorystore for Redis Standard Tier users will experience a failover event where clients will need to reconnect to the new primary instance 

• Cloud Memorystore Redis Basic Tier users will experience a full cache flush 

What maintenance controls are available? 

To control the impact of maintenance updates, Cloud Memorystore is offering both maintenance rescheduling and advanced notification for critical maintenance updates. If you are already a Cloud SQL user, you are most likely already familiar with these controls. These features are currently available in Preview for all Cloud Memorystore for Redis users. 

For each Cloud Memorystore instance, you may set an optional preferred maintenance window when updates are scheduled. Once an update is ready, it will automatically be scheduled to take place during your preferred maintenance window. We recommend choosing a period where application traffic has been historically low. For example, a food ordering application might select an overnight window when their application is unused due to restaurants being closed for the night. 

In addition to selecting the preferred maintenance window, users can subscribe to maintenance notifications for advanced notice when an update is scheduled. After an update is scheduled, subscribed users will receive an email notification with the date and time of the scheduled maintenance. At this point, you can begin to plan for the upcoming maintenance update, opt to undergo maintenance sooner than the scheduled date, or defer maintenance by up to one week after the originally scheduled time. 

Getting started with Cloud Memorystore’s new maintenance policy 

Let’s start by setting a preferred maintenance window for your instance. This can be done during instance creation or by editing your existing instance. On the Cloud Memorystore Instance create or edit page, find the “Maintenance” section and click “Edit”. You can then specify a preferred day and start hour as shown here:

Next, we recommend opting in to email notifications. You’ll start by navigating to the Cloud Console Communications Page. Select “ON” under Email for Cloud Memorystore. When notifications are enabled, you’ll get an email at least seven days before a scheduled update. To receive notifications, you must specify a preferred maintenance window.

After an update is scheduled, the email notification will contain details on rescheduling the update if the scheduled time is not acceptable. This information is also visible in your cloud console via the instance details page as shown here:

To learn more, you can find a detailed overview of Cloud Memorystore’s maintenance policy and how-to steps in our documentation. 

What’s next for Cloud Memorystore 

Improving our maintenance policy has been a highly requested feature for Cloud Memorystore. Cloud Memorystore recommends that all users opt-into the feature to ensure the smoothest possible maintenance experience. You can look forward to Cloud Memorystore for Memcached support in the near future as well as more advanced notification. Let us know what other features and capabilities you need with our Issue Tracker. We look forward to your feedback!