Skip to main content
Sponsor @cloudposse

Decide on Maintenance Page Solution

Problem​


When your sites go down, we need to be able to communicate more graciously to customers that you’re having issues than a generic “502 Bad Gateway” message.

info

Specifically, this decision relates to services behind an ALB. CloudFront and S3 are out of scope.

Solution​

We recommend deploying a static maintenance page. The industry best practice is to host the downtime page on a cloud provider that does not share infrastructure with your primary cloud provider. E.g. S3 is not recommended, as even S3 has gone down. That said, using a separate cloud provider is a micro-optimization for a very narrow set of failure scenarios.

Some related considerations are how the maintenance page will be activated.

Considered Options​

There are a few options:

Option 1​

Use route53 health checks. Cloud Posse does not recommend it because poorly implemented DNS-clients clients may cache the downtime host.

Option2​

Use CloudFront dynamically redirect to downtime page using an Origin Group with fail-over.

Here’s a simple example using terraform to provision a maintenance page on Cloud Flare.

Use ALB with fixed response

  • Use fixed-response with iframe (not ideal) to S3 static site

  • Use fixed-response populated with HTML from file with inline CSS, SVGs, etc. and no external dependencies (if possible)

  • Add GA code for analytics