A planned failover is similar to a disaster recovery scenario, except you are able
to notify users of the maintenance window, and allow data to finish replicating to
secondaries.
Please read this entire document as well as
[GitLab Geo Disaster Recovery](disaster-recovery.md) before proceeding.
### Notify users of scheduled maintenance
1. On the primary, in Admin Area > Messages, add a broadcast message.
Check Admin Area > Geo Nodes to estimate how long it will take to finish syncing.
```
We are doing scheduled maintenance at XX:XX UTC, expected to take less than 1 hour.
```
1. On the secondary, you may need to clear the cache for the broadcast message to show up.
### Block primary traffic
1. At the scheduled time, using your cloud provider or your node's firewall, block HTTP and SSH traffic to/from the primary except for your IP and the secondary's IP.
### Allow replication to finish as much as possible
1. On the secondary, navigate to Admin Area > Geo Nodes and wait until all replication progress is 100% on the secondary "Current node".
1. Navigate to Admin Area > Monitoring > Background Jobs > Queues and wait until the "geo" queues drop ideally to 0.
### Promote the secondary
1. Finally, follow [GitLab Geo Disaster Recovery](disaster-recovery.md) to promote the secondary to a primary.
