FYI: I’m going to upgrade RAM/CPU on the server at some point tomorrow evening (Jan 3) and add another 4GB RAM and some more CPU in perparation for kickoff & build season. The last time I upgraded, it took about 30-60 minutes to complete if I remember right.
Well that could throw off our draft time…
Thanks Brandon
Thank you very much!
Thanks for your efforts to make the season go smoothly for all of us!
Now, if the GDC is paying attention to CD, they just said to themselves “Release Game Hint 2 Tomorrow!”…
Thanks for your hard work Brandon!
Thanks so much Brandon! However, please do this update during the middle of the day tomorrow, as most students will be at school, and it won’t effect us. As for all of you adults who go on CD at work, you can use that hour to do something more productive: Like your job. 
Thank you! But just know, this exact time will be when game hint 2 comes out… You know that will happen
I hope that we really test the whole cloudserver farms ability. Every year we push the server we have to its limits.
Since FIRST also went to a cloud server ( I think I read that) the FIRST website should be interesting too!
I believe FIRST is using Akamai, a global content delivery network to publish their static content (and possibly accelerate some other content). We aren’t using a CDN … just a server that we can change RAM/CPU on the fly (via reboot), to be prepared during the season and scale down during the off-season. Given this ability, we were able to keep costs relatively the same, but hopefully handle the high load during the season.
This is happening now! 
Finished – let me know if anything weird is happening.
Access is back, Thanks Brandon!
It’s back! Thanks Brandon!
Bill must have been looking at this. The manual was posted when the site was down.
Actually, it was posted before hand. There’s already a thread about the encrypted manual here, and one about the most recent Bill’s Blog post (‘Flash Update’) here.
I kept refreshing, thinking that the manual talk had crashed the site. Luckily, I started when only a few minutes were left. Can you at least put up a graphic that says “Down for maintenance” or something similar, so I don’t get nervous?
I could … I’ll keep that in mind when I reduce the resources for May.
Up to over 510 users on cd. And its business as usual it seems.
It’s not even breaking a sweat.
knocks on wood