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A comment on Maintenance windows are a mistake. Parent comment

Re:Maintenance windows are a mistake by jameshart on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @08:44AM (#28758597)
> The maintenance window serves the customer a higher predictability on when to expect failure.

I don't get this - who wants 'predictable failure'?

If you're a B2C business, this is completely unacceptable - consumers don't plan their google searches around your preannounced downtime windows.

If you're a B2B SaaS business, well... your customers downstream have their own downtime to manage. If they have two vendors, each of which have 'scheduled maintenance windows' that don't overlap, then their combined availability just dropped dramatically.

Far better to build systems that are generally resilient to being down - queues for offline processing, idempotent operations, retriability... you'll wind up needing them to handle scheduled downtime anyway, and once you have them, you can switch to 'as needed' maintenance with no loss of service.

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Re:Maintenance windows are a mistake by CJefferson on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @09:15AM (#28758966)
Most people don't plan to have downtime, but turns out even the biggest companies in the world can't achieve zero downtime.

Also, some changes are one off and significant (like some database changes), they will hopefully go smoothly, but it is hard to fully prepare for every possible issue.

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