Morning folks—early visitors this Sunday might have noticed a “We’ll be right back!” maintenance page between the hours of about 6am-7am. This was while I was migrating Space City Weather and The Eyewall from their old hosting on an AWS EC2 t3a.large instance to their new home on a much fancier m8g.large instance. As of this morning, SCW is now fully ARMed up—that is, we’re utilizing AWS EC2 server instances hosted on Amazon’s Graviton ARM64 CPUs on all our infrastructure. Bye bye, x86!
This likely won’t have many practical effects for visitors, aside from perhaps faster page loading on things not in Cloudflare’s cache, but it’ll make a difference on the admin side of the house (primarily by making forecast image uploads a lot faster for poor @eric and @matt), and it puts us in a really solid position for the next few years’ worth of potential traffic growth. I also took the opportunity to update the server’s OS to the newly-released long-term server version of Ubuntu, 26.04 LTS, so that’s another update that should also keep for a few years.
Onward!!