Google Compute Engine offers live migration around maintenance events: https://c...

tszming · on Sept 25, 2014

Yes you are right, but GCE does not offer the flexibility that allow user to reboot themselves in their own convenient time.

Note: I am not saying the 'live migration' in GCE does not work, I am just saying I've more confident (well...peace of mind, IMO) to shutdown the my own database manually (which is automated and tested), ensure all data are flushed to disk, clients are disconnected gracefully and slave has promoted to master.. and things like that, rather than some black magic like 'live migration'

Of course, I am not saying 'live migration' is wrong, but it is just my preference.

crb · on Sept 25, 2014

They demo'd live migration while streaming 1080p video, with no outage. It was described as having the network cable unplugged for a tenth of a second.

There's a story from a partner who was testing it, who at the end of the day said "when are you going to live migrate us?", only to be told that Google had moved them six times that day and they hadn't even noticed.

morpher · on Sept 25, 2014

You can configure your instances to automatically shutdown and restart instead of migrating: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances#onhostmainte...

Alternatively, you have a short period (60s) before the migration occurs during which you can lame a service: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/metadata#maintenanceev...

However, I'll grant that both of these lack the "in your own convenient time" portion of your desire.

gazarsgo · on Sept 25, 2014

VMWare has this feature too, they call it vMotion. I haven't found anyone who could explain the resilience of vMotion in production use cases though.