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Last updated: 26 Apr 2023

Move apps between servers

Most frontend and backend apps on GOV.UK share a small number of servers. In some circumstances, apps may use more than their share of resources and may affect other apps on the same server. In these cases, apps can be moved to their own servers using those steps.

Note

You need to be at least a Power User in AWS to be able to run the following procedure. You can check by looking in the [govuk-aws-data] repository. Some IAM changes may require Administrator access, so you’ll need to ask someone in the GOV.UK Platform Engineering team to run these for you.

  1. Add Terraform configuration (1, 2, 3) to create the new servers, load balancers, security groups, DNS entries etc.
  2. Add data to complement the configuration above (1, 2).
  3. Deploy the Terraform configuration. You need to do this three times for each environment:
    1. infra-security-groups project in the govuk stack.
    2. app-name-of-your-app project in the blue stack (replace app-name-of-your-app with the name you configured above).
    3. infra-public-services project in the govuk stack (only if your app is accessible directly from the public internet).

For each deployment, set the environment to one of integration, staging or production and run the plan command first to double-check the changes before running the apply command to make the changes.

👉 Deploy AWS infrastructure with Terraform