Doc::2020 Hosting Upgrade

Introduction

A major upgrade to the CS web hosting system is planned for Fall of 2020. The system will continue to be Apache 2.4 based, and access to the web data at /web will remain the same.

What is New

Switch from Virtual Machines to Docker containers running under Kubernetes

This is the biggest change. Apache will be running as a docker container managed by Kubernetes. Load balancing and SSL offloading will be handled by Kubernetes as well.

PHP upgraded from 5.5 to 7.2

This is a significant change, PHP 7.2 is not completely backwards compatible with 5.5, See: https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration70.php

Auto Redirect to HTTPS

All sites will be automatically redirected to encrypted HTTPS.

Potential Issues

Hosted sites might run into the following issues:

• PHP errors caused by the upgrade in PHP. This will generally be caused by old code (PHP 7 was released in 2015) and can be fixed by updating the PHP code.
• Certificate errors. This can be caused by having a site hosted that is not a *.cs.vt.edu hostname. If you have a valid certificate for your domain, then I can upload it to the server and host directly.
• Page insecure warnings on some browsers. This is usually caused by mixing https and http content. If a page has direct unencrypted links to components (such as images or CSS) then some browsers will pop up a warning. This can be fixed by making the links relative or encrypted.