Aptible’s Response to COVID-19

Aptible's internal response to COVID-19 began on Monday, March 9, and we've been updating it every day since. As of Wednesday, March 11, all Aptible team members will be working from home, and all company travel has been suspended, until further notice. We will continue to update our policies as the situation changes, in order to promote the safety and well-being of our team, their families, and our customers.

If you are an Aptible customer, we want you to be confident that Aptible has taken all steps necessary to ensure that the spreading pandemic does not impact your apps and databases hosted on Aptible Deploy, or your access to Aptible Comply. As such, I’d like to talk about some of the risks we’re analyzing based on COVID-19, and how we’re mitigating each.

Risk #1: Our Reliability Teams become unavailable.

To prepare for team member unavailability, localized service unavailability, or other potential disruptions to our Reliability Teams, we have 3 levels of escalation for on-call team members at all times, 24/7. Our Reliability Team members are all in different cities, and distributed across all 4 North American time zones. In addition, we maintain a pool of team members outside the on-call rotation who are trained and tested on technical business continuity response, should we require additional capacity.

Risk #2: Our critical vendors are impacted or become unavailable.

Our most critical vendor is AWS. Aptible does not operate any physical data centers, instead relying on AWS for all data infrastructure. As a result, we directly inherit all of AWS’s physical data center controls, in particular their pandemic response policies:

AWS incorporates pandemic response policies and procedures into its disaster recovery planning to prepare to respond rapidly to infectious disease outbreak threats.

Aptible’s APIs are set up for multi-region fault tolerance. As an Aptible customer, you have multi-AZ fault tolerance by default, and you can set up multi-region fault tolerance by creating 2 or more dedicated stacks in separate AWS regions.

For dependent services other than AWS, Aptible Deploy is set up to continue working as normal even when these services are completely unavailable. You can see historical examples of this in action when Docker Hub and Quay have been unavailable.

Risk #3: Our operational processes fail due to team members working from home.

We’ve been a distributed team since 2014, and have cultivated processes and norms to enable us to work fully effectively while remote. None of our operational processes expect team members to be in the same location, or in a sanctioned Aptible office.

If you have questions about any risks not mentioned above, or any other concerns related to COVID-19, please don’t hesitate to reach out. From the Aptible family to yours, please take care during this challenging time.