4 ms·

I agree that it is an economic decision. In my understanding it didn’t cost them millions of dollars to do it zero-downtime. Maybe a $10k-$50k in development/a

• koreth1 5y ago
  > Also engineers get better (and happier) when they do challenging tasks! Better maybe, but happier, I'm not so sure. At my last job I was the main developer in charge of hitting our zero-downtime target for code deploys and system upgrades, and it was a pain in the ass to always have to implement multi-stage migration processes with bidirectional compatibility between adjacent stages for things that would have been very little work if we'd been able to schedule an hour of downtime. The cost was worth it from a business point of view, but it wasn't much fun to actually do the work. Though I guess I agree with the "happier" part too if you're just talking about doing the initial infrastructure and software-architecture work that allows those annoying multi-stage migrations to run seamlessly. I did enjoy writing the migration framework code and figuring out what all the stages would need to be.
• Cullinet 5y ago
  > Also engineers get better (and happier) when they do challenging tasks! I would rather encourage them to engineer to the limit of ability but deliver to Ed: within the limit of burning out my engineering team, plus some comfortable margin gained from the encouragement given, which should be rewarded. I've talked myself into engineering insufficient time for unforseen downtime tasks and it took me a while to realise that I was wearing my management hat as a founder and not the engineering hat I should have been wearing.