Service power cycle#

Aiven service power off and power on is more than stopping and starting a service on nodes. For better utilisation of resources on Aiven platform, idle resources will be released and only the necessary data will be kept after power off. The impact on the service is different depending on the service type and plan.

Warning

Depending on service type and plan, data loss may happen during a service power off, so it is important for users to understand the consequences before powering off a service.

Aiven service power off and power on can be done on Aiven Console or through Aiven CLI.

Power off#

Whenever an Aiven service is powered off:

  • All virtual machine(s) of the service will be removed from the public cloud.

  • The service information and configuration will be stored on Aiven Platform, while service data will be lost if there’s no backup available .

  • If the service has time-based or PITR (point in time recovery) backups, they will be kept on Aiven Platform. The backups are listed on the Backups page of the service in Aiven Console. Absence of the Backups view means the service has no backups. For details on backups for different Aiven services on different plans, refer to Backups at Aiven.

Warning

Aiven does periodic cleanup of powered-off services on services powered off for longer than 180 consecutive days. Notification emails will be sent before actions are taken.

  • The message in the Confirm power off window will give some hints on the consequence of the power off. For example, powering off an Aiven service can erase data since the latest backup because the service only has time-based but not PITR backups.

  • Moreover, on the Backups page, hovering the mouse over the help icon (if it’s available) can present some details on the content of the backups. This information suggests what can be restored if the service is powered on later.

Warning

For backup enabled Aiven for Apache Kafka® services, topic configuration, schemas and connectors are all backed up, but not the data in topics. Therefore all topic data will be lost on power off. For Kafka services without backups, topic configurations together with all topic data will be lost on power off.

Power on#

When a service is powered on, the following things will happen:

  • New virtual machine(s) will be created on the specified public cloud for the service.

  • Service will be started with the stored configuration parameters.

  • The latest time-based backup that is available will be restored. The restore time depends on the network bandwidth and disk IOPS allocated to the service plan as well as the size of the backup. It could take from minutes to hours. Smaller plans with larger backups take longer time than bigger plans with smaller backups. Restore progress can be checked by Aiven support with Aiven Admin CLI.

  • If PITR backup is available, the database transaction log (e.g. WAL for PostgreSQL®, binlog for MySQL) will be replayed to recover the service data to a specific point in time.

  • Service will be ready for serving.

Warning

Depending on the service plan, backups have different retention periods. Data will be lost after the retention period.

Note

Maintenance updates are automatically applied when a service is powered on as new virtual machines are created for the service to run on.