The joys of cloud computing

Yesterday, my Scaleway hosted VPS was scheduled for migration to another physical server. According to Scaleway, the expected downtime was only a few minutes. The maintenance was scheduled to begin at 10:00 UTC, so I was expecting the server to be available when I tried to connect over SSH at 11:30 UTC. Unfortunately, there was no sign of life to be found.

Meanwhile in France

I quickly accessed the Scaleway dashboard to see if there were any reported issues and noticed that the server had been trying to shut itself down for the last hour.

I proceeded to create a support ticket with Scaleway, asking them to take the server down forcefully. Scaleway responded within half an hour and resolved the issue. When all was said and done, I ended up with two and a half hours of downtime.

This morning, in the US of A

Fast forward to today, and I suddenly noticed that my Digital Ocean droplet had become unresponsive. After logging in and launching their console to access my troublesome droplet, I was slapped with the following message:

The droplet was running Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS with the 4.15.0-60-generic kernel. This is my second Ubuntu Bionic Beaver instance (different software stacks) experiencing kernel panic during the last few days. I guess Canonical has some “software engineering” to do here as this 4.15.0-60-generic kernel seems to be borked.

A potential solution arrives

Coincidentally, I just got my hands on a new Raspberry Pi 4. Perhaps it’s time to return to Raspberry Pi based hosting.