Heroku Redis Maintenance Windows

Last updated 13 July 2016

From time to time, Heroku must take your Redis instance offline to perform maintenance tasks. Typical tasks include upgrading the underlying infrastructure of your instance (for example, patching the operating system or required libraries) or upgrading Redis itself. This maintenance is handled automatically by Heroku.

Installing the CLI plugin

Heroku Redis is integrated directly into the Heroku CLI, providing many useful commands, including redis:maintenance. We recommend that you install the heroku-redis plugin before starting to use Heroku Redis:

$ heroku plugins:install heroku-redis

Checking if maintenance is required for your Redis instance

You can check if maintenance is required on your Redis instance by using the redis:info command.

$ heroku redis:info
=== redis-softly-4514 (REDIS_URL)
Plan:               Premium 7
Status:             available
...
Maintenance:        required by 2016-02-01 00:00:00 +0000

Setting a maintenance window

Users can specify the day of week and time (UTC) at which the maintenance will occur:

$ heroku redis:maintenance --window="Sunday 14:30"

Setting a maintenance window allows you to minimize the impact on your application and users. We recommend selecting a time when maintenance would have the least impact on your business. Maintenance windows are 4 hours long starting at the time you specify. The actual time required for maintenance depends on exactly what’s taking place, but it will usually require your Redis instance to be offline for only a few minutes. If you don’t specify a window, one will be selected randomly.

Limitations

Maintenance windows that can be set and manual maintenance runs are only available on premium plans.

Heroku will make the best effort to honor your maintenance window request but it is not guaranteed. If there is an emergency where the security or integrity of your data is threatened, we may perform the maintenance outside of your regular window at our discretion.