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ashokp1
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Aug 11, 2025

Best approach to serve maintenance page

Hi, We need to put website under maintenance for about 6 hours.

 

Traffic flow: Clients -->Akamai--->F5-->Backend servers.

 

We have maintenance page hosted in AWS cloud Front.

 

which approach is better?

  1. DNS Change – Temporarily point our domain (via CNAME) to CloudFront by adjusting the TTL to 2 minutes.
  2. F5 Configuration – Issue a 302 redirect from F5 to CloudFront or forward (reverse proxy) traffic from F5 to CloudFront by modifying the Host header. This keeps the browser on our domain and returns a 200 OK.

 

Main concerns : 

  • Avoiding browser/edge caching issues (we can clear Akamai cache if needed).
  • Ensuring a quick rollback after maintenance.

Which approach would be best? Could you advise on the correct implementation?

3 Replies

  • Hello,

     

    302 would be ok especially if you have CloudFront serve your domain.

    Reverse proxying with host rewrite is a good option too

    DNS might be an issue as ttl might not be respected.

    Why don't you just host your maintenance page in F5?

  • If the maintenance page doesn't really send you anywhere I would recommend setting up an iRule that provides the maintenance page to the client depending on the pool status.

  • Hello ashokp1​ 

     

    You can use the BIG-IP system to respond (with a maintenance page) if the virtual server resources (pool or pool members) are unavailable.

    When the BIG-IP system receives a request for a virtual server that does not have available resources (for example, the pool is marked down with no available pool members) you can configure an iRule to send an HTTP response, such as a maintenance page, to the client. To do so, perform the following procedure:

    Use an iRule to display a maintenance page when the pool is down 

    BR
    Aswin