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I think it's always worth questioning both sides. Why is downtime acceptable? People on this site routinely complain about windows needing a restart for system

I think it's always worth questioning both sides. Why is downtime acceptable? People on this site routinely complain about windows needing a restart for system updates while boasting about their Linux servers uptime. People talk about how kubernetes is overkill for many people, but it gives you rolling deployments for your applications out of the box. There's also the "slippery slope" argument. A 0 downtime migration means 0 downtime. A 5 minute migration creeps up to a 30 minutes migration occasionally, and then regression to the mean happens, causing standard migrations to be 30 minutes.

Daishiman 5y ago
A lot of 0-downtime migrations end up turning into a months-long ordeal and can still fail. Allowing maintenance windows means you can do things in a much simple manner. Need to take a snapshot of a DB without running into issues with a production system adding data? Sure, go ahead, you just saved two months.
- hinkley 5y ago
  It's the old can/should argument. The principle of something like zero downtime or switching a vendor out to save 20% may not stack up against the reality in opportunity costs, employee burnout, and customer turnover. My company is reorganizing and so everyone is trying to settle old philosophical debates during The Churn. But everyone is overextended and a number of us have started pushing back. Just the meetings to discuss changing vendors might push the break-even point out 6 months, before you even get into implementation costs. The more time we spend working on infrastructure instead of customer-facing features and bugs, the more likely those customers are to wander off.
munk-a 5y ago
> Why is downtime acceptable? At least where I'm working downtime is acceptable because our customer base is composed of professionals in north america that work 9-5 thus taking the DB offline for five minutes at midnight PST has essentially no cost to our client base. To contrast that, spending three months developing a rollout plan costs our company dearly in competitive advantage. I agree that it's always worth examining from both sides but I also think that 0 downtime migration is both a shiny interesting problem and a point of pride for developers that can cause a company to vastly over invest in a complex technical solution to a problem they never had.
xmprt 5y ago
I think the slippery slope argument is almost always a fallacy. In practice you can say "we accept 99.99% availability" (which is about 1 hour every year) and budget for that. Your service might go down for unplanned reasons such as an outage but it could also go down for planned maintenance and as long as you're within that budget it seems ok.
deleted 5y ago
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Daishiman 5y ago

A lot of 0-downtime migrations end up turning into a months-long ordeal and can still fail. Allowing maintenance windows means you can do things in a much simple manner. Need to take a snapshot of a DB without running into issues with a production system adding data? Sure, go ahead, you just saved two months.

hinkley 5y ago
It's the old can/should argument. The principle of something like zero downtime or switching a vendor out to save 20% may not stack up against the reality in opportunity costs, employee burnout, and customer turnover. My company is reorganizing and so everyone is trying to settle old philosophical debates during The Churn. But everyone is overextended and a number of us have started pushing back. Just the meetings to discuss changing vendors might push the break-even point out 6 months, before you even get into implementation costs. The more time we spend working on infrastructure instead of customer-facing features and bugs, the more likely those customers are to wander off.

munk-a 5y ago

> Why is downtime acceptable? At least where I'm working downtime is acceptable because our customer base is composed of professionals in north america that work 9-5 thus taking the DB offline for five minutes at midnight PST has essentially no cost to our client base. To contrast that, spending three months developing a rollout plan costs our company dearly in competitive advantage. I agree that it's always worth examining from both sides but I also think that 0 downtime migration is both a shiny interesting problem and a point of pride for developers that can cause a company to vastly over invest in a complex technical solution to a problem they never had.

xmprt 5y ago

I think the slippery slope argument is almost always a fallacy. In practice you can say "we accept 99.99% availability" (which is about 1 hour every year) and budget for that. Your service might go down for unplanned reasons such as an outage but it could also go down for planned maintenance and as long as you're within that budget it seems ok.

deleted 5y ago

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