Xero to go offline as it continues move to AWS Cloud

The Xero accounting platform will be offline for a short while next week as the company continues its migration to Amazon Web Services.

In a notice to its customers, the company says the system will be unavailable for 'a few hours' on Sunday 21 August from 6am.

Xero announced its move to AWS in May.

"Since June we've been moving large numbers of our customers across to AWS every weekend," explains Duncan Ritchie, Xero, in a company blog post.

"Now that over 50% of our customers are on AWS, it is time for us to move the shared applications across too.

Xero says the move to AWS is designed to allow growth to millions of customers and further reduce chances of downtime.

The next move is to shift the shared application components, which means the company has to take the system offline.

During the offline period Xero users will no have access to their Xero accounts or any part of the application.

Ritchie says the move to AWS means Xero will be less likely to need to take the application offline to make changes in future.

"This migration is happening at the least busy times for our customers. We've chosen the weekend carefully around our global customers' key accounting activities so we disrupt customers as little as possible – and we hope that most won't even notice," he explains.

Xero's move to the AWS hosting platform has been phased over a number on months. Xero data will continue to be stored on serves located in the United States.

"The new AWS platform provides improved levels of security, availability and performance that will support massive future growth," Ritchie says.

"The new platform will enable us to continuously deploy new features to our customers.