Deploy self-hosted pelias-canada on our infra (PHAC geocoder down)

[diegoripley]

Summary

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) Pelias geocoder powering our Census data preview is currently down. We will deploy a self-hosted Pelias using the pelias-canada configuration to restore reliability and remove the external dependency.

• Affected area: Census data preview geocoding
• External endpoint: https://geocoder.alpha.phac.gc.ca
• Status: Service unresponsive/down as of March 6, 2026
• Proposed fix: Deploy pelias-canada on our infrastructure

Impact

• Geocoding unavailable for users, blocking address-to-coordinate lookups.
• Degraded demo/analysis workflows and increased support burden.

Decision/Approvals Requested

• Approve deployment of a self-hosted Pelias (pelias-canada) on our infrastructure.
• Allocate budget for compute, RAM, SSD storage, and bandwidth.
• Assign an executive/PM sponsor and delivery owner.

Sponsors/Owners

• Sponsor: [name]
• Delivery owner: [team/lead]
• Infra/SRE: [team]
• Data ingestion/updates: [team]

Scope

• Stand up Pelias with the pelias-canada configuration on our infra.
• Ingest and schedule regular updates for the Canada datasets used by pelias-canada.
• Expose a stable, TLS-terminated endpoint within our infrastructure.
• Add monitoring, alerting, and basic runbook documentation.

Out of Scope (tracked separately)

• Application-side changes and any API/provider abstraction.
• Temporary commercial/third-party fallbacks.

Tasks/Checklist

• Confirm outage details and capture brief error summary for records.
• Capacity planning (CPU, RAM, SSD, storage growth, bandwidth).
• Provision infrastructure and storage; set up networking and TLS.
• Deploy Pelias components per pelias-canada guidance.
• Run initial data imports; validate index size and health.
• Schedule ongoing data updates; add monitoring/alerts.
• Document operational runbook and ownership/on-call.
• Post status update in product/docs noting PHAC geocoder outage and migration plan.

Acceptance Criteria

• Self-hosted Pelias is healthy and reachable in our environment.
• Data imports complete successfully; scheduled updates are in place and observable.
• Monitoring and alerts cover availability, latency, and index health.
• Public note added to documentation stating PHAC geocoder is down and we are operating a self-hosted replacement.

Communications

• Add a short outage/migration note to the Census data preview docs and status page.
• Notify stakeholders of the cutover plan and expected timelines.

Links

• pelias-canada repository: https://github.com/PHACDataHub/pelias-canada
• PHAC endpoint currently down: https://geocoder.alpha.phac.gc.ca

Attachments