Update: This infrastructure maintenance is complete at this time, and Harvest is back online for all customers. Thanks for your patience while we improved our infrastructure.

On Sunday, October 17th we will be taking Harvest offline for two hours to complete a migration to a new infrastructure platform. We wanted to share all the details about this event with you.

What impact does this have on me?

There will be a brief window of time, from 6am - 8am EDT (in your local time), when you won’t be able to access your Harvest account. Similarly, any apps or integrations you use for Harvest will not work during this window (this includes things like the Harvest for iPhone or Android apps, as well as integrations such as QuickBooks Online or Basecamp). We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you or your team!

Is my data safe?

Absolutely. All Harvest customer data, and all our product functionality, remains unchanged with this move. We’re simply changing how we deploy the software that runs Harvest (meta, we know). This migration allows Harvest to modernize our infrastructure for improved performance, agility, and capacity for all customers.

Do I need to do anything?

No action is required from you. This post is just to inform you about the period of time that Harvest will be inaccessible so that you can plan ahead.

How can I follow the progress of this maintenance?

We will keep all customers informed of the progress of this maintenance using HarvestStatus.com, as well as our Twitter account @harvest.

Why is this migration happening? 

We are upgrading our infrastructure in order to keep Harvest running fast and smoothly for all customers around the world. 

What if I want more info?

We’re happy to share more details about this migration for those who are interested.

Harvest currently serves all customers from a datacenter that we brought online back in 2013. Over the years we have improved our hosting platform incrementally, and the fundamental base platform remained consistent: racks of dedicated bare metal servers and network devices in a physical datacenter. Modernizing this layer of infrastructure has been a goal of ours for a while now.

For a couple of years, we’ve been learning how to successfully leverage modern cloud-based tools to build a more flexible and powerful hosting solution for our customers. When deploying software into the public cloud, the global presence of a top-tier cloud vendor translates directly to improved access performance for all customers. 

There are other benefits to this move: we are able to adapt our infrastructure design over time to keep our products working optimally. Decisions can be refined, improvements can be tested, and designs can be perfected over time without the constraints of bare metal servers.

Another advantage of a top-tier cloud vendor is simpler infrastructure expansion and growth. This translates to better application performance for all Harvest customers as we grow.

For the more technical audience among Harvest customers, I’ll touch briefly on some of the details of our new infrastructure platform. 

Over the last couple of years, we have carefully redesigned our infrastructure to leverage containers running in Kubernetes, and we have slowly transitioned most of our systems over to this new platform. We began this journey with our internal tools, such as logging and monitoring systems. We learned how to stabilize these tools in the cloud. Then we moved our backup systems. Next, we moved some of the behind-the-scenes applications which interact with our customers. Following the success of all of these migrations, we began to move the applications which directly serve our customers over to this new platform. The final remaining item is the core of Harvest itself, and the migration date for this component is October 17th. 

We look forward to being able to serve all of our customers from this new and improved infrastructure in October, and we’ll let you know here as soon as we have completed this migration.