A great lab culling is coming...

Update:  It's been a week since we deleted all our older, unused lab environments 
(those that have not been used in over a year).  Late next week, we'll enter the second 
phase of this cleanup.  We will be removing lab environments that have not been 
active in the last six (6) months.  If you think that this may target a lab environment 
you have, but would like to keep, simply start the lab.  This will update it's last active 
date/time stamp.  However, realize doing so will charge your lab runtime limits.

I'm starting this thread for both information passing and civil discussion. It will be updated as additional information is made available.

Earlier this week we had a severe outage of our cloud provider. During the Root Cause Analysis of the event, the cloud provider identified two API calls that we utilize that cause issues and hampered their outage recovery. More specifically, the volume of data returned by the API calls is causing degradation of the API service.

To that end, as an immediate response to keep this type of outage from occurring again, we're removing applications created prior to 2017, and applications through May 2017 that have not been booted in the last year.

Ultimately, to better manage our lab environments, we're going to move to a retention policy where any lab environment that's been inactive for 90 days will be subject to removal. The first step in this move to a different lab management policy will be to update our Terms and Conditions. After that, we'll target labs that have not been used in more than the last 6 months. After that, we will move towards the 90 days of inactivity target. Lastly, we will automate this 90 day check so that these labs are reaped without our direct intervention.

Why are we doing this? To combat capacity related issues when communicating with our lab-backing cloud provider.

What do you mean by inactive for 90 days? An inactive lab is one that has not been used within a 90 day period. If you boot your lab environment (or any of it's component machines) that will update your last active timestamp and keep the lab for a fresh 90 day period.

I'm worried that my labs will be targeted! What do I do? Log in and boot those labs you want to keep, that will update their last active time and refresh them to a full 90 days of retention. But, keep in mind that if you're running the lab, you will use at least an hour of your 80 or 400 hour runtime limit. And also recall that the default auto-shutdown timer is 2 hours, so if you boot them and leave them, you will use 2 hours of that allotment.

All the Best,

STM

Scott McBrien
Principal Product Manager, Red Hat Online Trianing
Red Hat Certified Architect, Level VI (100-000-264)