From Exceptional Maintenance to Automated Routine Operation: Datacenter Switchover for Wikipedia

Explore a conference talk from SREcon23 Europe/Middle East/Africa that details the journey of automating Wikipedia's datacenter switchover process. Learn how the Wikimedia Foundation transformed a complex, multi-day operation requiring extensive engineer involvement into a streamlined, routine procedure. Discover the open-source tools and architectural approaches implemented to reduce toil and minimize service disruption. Gain insights into how these strategies can be applied to similar challenges in other infrastructures. Follow the evolution from a single core datacenter to a efficient multi-datacenter setup, and understand how automation has enabled newer team members to confidently lead switchovers with minimal downtime and performance impact.