I think you will find that even in large organizations with dedicated teams owning server ops, if a problem is impacting customers in the middle of the day, the

I think you will find that even in large organizations with dedicated teams owning server ops, if a problem is impacting customers in the middle of the day, there will be a way to get the deployment window open quickly. Doing away with maintenance windows altogether sounds great from our point of view as developers, but it shouldn't come at the expense of customers suffering horrible latency during peak hours because the servers are at reduced capacity while a significant percentage of them are busy with deployments. I understand the benefits of rapid iteration through continuous deployment (and intensive automated testing), but cloud platforms like Heroku and Beanstalk don't really help here. Cloud deployment and the ability for developers to push a button and have their changes show up in production quickly also doesn't mean you don't need QA anymore. That's a separate decision. I understand that making deployment a simpler process through hosted server farms is great in that it takes off a lot of pressure from your ops team, but that doesn't change the development process.