As part of an investment into the future of cbtec Video, we're rewriting the entire backend of the application from scratch, just like we did with the front-end.
Why?
Our current backend is fragmented into different systems, causing slower than optimal load times and relies on less modern architecture. To prepare for the future and embrace modern development practices, we're stripping out the old and putting in the new for a faster development workflow.
How?
Well, put simply, we're:
- rewriting the backend services in a brand new, modern language that suits our new development methodologies. - going completely Cloud-based for our entire stack, allowing us the flexibility to scale from small to large in preparation for our new media strategy (stay tuned on that one). In fact, we've already completed the first part of this migration. Our video streaming services are already entirely cloud based. - simplifying our systems by removing old and unused services from the first version of cbtec Video in 2023. When we upgraded to Version 2, we mainly focused on the UI and reused our backend systems, which led to a square peg in a round hole situation. Whilst it worked perfectly fine on the user side, adding new features on the backend has quickly become tiresome.
This is the first stage of many improvement works that we've been planning for cbtec Video for some time now. This extended maintenance window allows us to lay the ground work for our future development, prioritising reliability, availability and an improved, modern development flow. These improvements don't only affect our developers, but users will experience a greatly improved, integrated cbtec Video as we can provide feature updates and improvements at greater speed with less downtime.
The Cloud hasn't been reliable lately, how can we trust this to improve reliability?
This maintenance is part of the first stage of improvement works that will continue through into 2027. Seeing the recent outages with Amazon AWS raised some concerns about our own infrastructure, as our Video Streaming service is hosted on AWS. We are planning on provisioning duplicate and integrated systems across multiple cloud providers to ensure reliability and availability, deploying intelligent load balancers to handle when a Cloud service drops. This is not in scope for this maintenance window, but it sets the ground work that will enable us to provision new Cloud providers with minimal downtime, reinforcing our services further.
How long is cbtec Video expected to be down?
Since this is a major maintenance operation, switching our services over to different providers along with a large scale backend upgrade, we expect to be down for a maximum planned duration of 5 hours. However, as much as we try to plan, maintenance windows come with some unpredictability: Sometimes, we can bring services back up early. Other times, Hell has frozen over and we've got an all-nighter to pull.
We'll keep you posted, but we will keep the current infrastructure active for as long as possible to minimise downtime if something goes wrong. We're limiting access artificially for a portion of the maintenance window to make the move easier.
What is "Reinforce"?
Reinforce is the maintenance group name we've given these improvement works to make it sound cool and hip... also just to group all of these maintenance works into one singular category where we can easily track our progress.
Reinforce has currently been planned to four steps to complete our future preparation works :
**Reinforce I (Current)** - Rewrite backend services and complete Cloud Migration. Est. 5hr downtime Reinforce II - CI/CD Development Pipelines (Makes deploying changes to front and backend much easier and trackable) Reinforce III - Major upgrade to the front end to integrate better with our brand new backend. Reinforce IV - Redundancy across multiple Cloud providers. ... [ Potential future expansions ] ...
What's next?
We'll keep you posted after completing this maintenance window when we're making future progress, Reinforce II is mainly on the development side, so users will not see virtually any impact apart from a slight delay in feature updates once it starts, but we will still keep you posted.
If you notice any bugs or things that you want us to add in the meantime, reach out to us at https://cbtec.co.uk/contact and we'll try to include it in our maintenance window.
Thank you for your continued support!
Posted Aug 14, 2026 - 13:35 BST
This scheduled maintenance affects: cbtec (cbtec.co.uk), Core Services (Core Website Infrastructure), and Service-wide (API).