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I find it very hard to come up with a use case where a weekly 6 hours of downtime at night EST would be acceptable. US government websites already often do thi

I find it very hard to come up with a use case where a weekly 6 hours of downtime at night EST would be acceptable. US government websites already often do this, and I find that completely unacceptable since these services need to be available to anyone, regardless of work and life schedules. Any website that's international would also suffer greatly for an EST centralized scheduled downtime. Maybe a very localized website that doesn't have much impact on real life?

endisneigh 5y ago
Why wouldn’t it be acceptable? People aren’t available all the time either, nor are stores. In fact software is unique in its availability.
- yupper32 5y ago
  Frankly, because it can be. Weekly scheduled downtime is arbitrary, manufactured, and lazy. Of course, having to schedule the occasional downtime for a database migration is fine. There's probably a few times a year that you'd need to do it if you don't have the bandwidth to do fancy zero-downtime solutions. It's the weekly arbitrary downtime that I'm firmly against.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Why is it lazy? When things are up people have to work. Do you believe people should be working all of the time? I think regular downtime is only natural. If you had to choose between 95% availability or 100% availability other than the before mentioned downtime which would you choose?
    - yupper32 5y ago
      Sorry I'm a bit confused by your argument. > When things are up people have to work. That's not true. Monitoring software and on-call rotations are well established things, and wouldn't even go away in your world. Believe it or not, people who run websites already sleep at night. > Do you believe people should be working all of the time? I'm not sure where you got that. Besides, you're already having people in the office in the middle of the night every Sunday already. Or are you saying that the downtime is when your team gets to sleep? > If you had to choose between 95% availability or 100% availability other than the before mentioned downtime which would you choose? Again, not sure what you're getting at. There's only a few reasons why you'd need to schedule a downtime. Database migrations are a good one. All of the reasons should only happen a few times a year, likely. Way better than 52 times a year.
      - endisneigh 5y ago
        I’m not making a particular argument. I’m just wondering if having regular downtime is better or worse in terms of reducing engineering complexity.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Perhaps. Oftentimes it’s driven by legacy batch processes on mainframes. There’s a wide variety of reasons why it may make sense to carry on in that way.
  - nijave 5y ago
    It's expensive to run things like that. Multiple "9"s are significantly more expensive to engineer than, say, 95% uptime. In general, the correct amount of allowable downtime is when losses due to downtime are greater than the cost of increasing availability (which depends on the system). Should we raise taxes to increase government website availability? Not sure there's a clear cut case and it would definitely depend on each specific website and what utility it provides

endisneigh 5y ago

Why wouldn’t it be acceptable? People aren’t available all the time either, nor are stores. In fact software is unique in its availability.

yupper32 5y ago
Frankly, because it can be. Weekly scheduled downtime is arbitrary, manufactured, and lazy. Of course, having to schedule the occasional downtime for a database migration is fine. There's probably a few times a year that you'd need to do it if you don't have the bandwidth to do fancy zero-downtime solutions. It's the weekly arbitrary downtime that I'm firmly against.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Why is it lazy? When things are up people have to work. Do you believe people should be working all of the time? I think regular downtime is only natural. If you had to choose between 95% availability or 100% availability other than the before mentioned downtime which would you choose?
  - yupper32 5y ago
    Sorry I'm a bit confused by your argument. > When things are up people have to work. That's not true. Monitoring software and on-call rotations are well established things, and wouldn't even go away in your world. Believe it or not, people who run websites already sleep at night. > Do you believe people should be working all of the time? I'm not sure where you got that. Besides, you're already having people in the office in the middle of the night every Sunday already. Or are you saying that the downtime is when your team gets to sleep? > If you had to choose between 95% availability or 100% availability other than the before mentioned downtime which would you choose? Again, not sure what you're getting at. There's only a few reasons why you'd need to schedule a downtime. Database migrations are a good one. All of the reasons should only happen a few times a year, likely. Way better than 52 times a year.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      I’m not making a particular argument. I’m just wondering if having regular downtime is better or worse in terms of reducing engineering complexity.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Perhaps. Oftentimes it’s driven by legacy batch processes on mainframes. There’s a wide variety of reasons why it may make sense to carry on in that way.
- nijave 5y ago
  It's expensive to run things like that. Multiple "9"s are significantly more expensive to engineer than, say, 95% uptime. In general, the correct amount of allowable downtime is when losses due to downtime are greater than the cost of increasing availability (which depends on the system). Should we raise taxes to increase government website availability? Not sure there's a clear cut case and it would definitely depend on each specific website and what utility it provides