I really don't agree with this hard-line stance on maintenance windows. The use of extreme examples doesn't really strengthen the argument. It really comes dow

I really don't agree with this hard-line stance on maintenance windows. The use of extreme examples doesn't really strengthen the argument. It really comes down to the cost of implementing "Super HA" for everything. If that cost is more than the tangible loss of having 30 minutes down each month, it's not worth it. And it's not just IT stuff that has to be "Super HA", it's everything. Updates need to be atomic. Every database change needs to be able to be half-done so staged rollouts can take place on application servers. That requires 10 to 100 times more effort, and therefore cost. Not to mention testing, certification, etc. It all comes with baggage. I run a bunch of very small sites on a single Digital Ocean droplet. It has no HA whatsover, it's just a small VM running nginx. Yet, somehow, it has better uptime than every single one of the 10 biggest sites last year (30 min downtime total for 2020). Sure, I could beat that down to zero by using a load balancer and multiple servers, replication, shared storage, all the shiny stuff, but it's just as likely that something could go wrong because of the added complexity, and take me down for an hour or more. There's never a single Perfect Solution to every problem. That's why we don't build suspension bridges across creeks.