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When exactly is a good time for Google to release code? Facebook? Twitter? These are global markets. There are over 1 billion smartphones in the world, alone, a

When exactly is a good time for Google to release code? Facebook? Twitter? These are global markets. There are over 1 billion smartphones in the world, alone, and less than a tenth are US; I'd gander most are used to interact with one of these or similar big guys that do "continuous deployment."

jonknee 14y ago
The best time to deploy is the time with the best engineers at the ready. If you're updating component X, you should do so when the stakeholders of X are online. It sounds like Google was able to solve things quickly, I don't think deploying at another time would have been any better.
- zalew 14y ago
  > The best time to deploy is the time with the best engineers at the ready. or to put it simple: not at 1700 on friday.
- babarock 14y ago
  I'd even argue that the best time to deploy is during the best engineers' working hours. At least you guarantee they're around when/if things go bad. And by "best", I don't mean all stars (a la Fitzpatrick, Norvig, Pike or other Google celebs), but the engineer who actually followed the whole project/patch from dev environment to production.
- thezilch 14y ago
  Absolutely, I started editing in a quip about how unscalable, even for Google, to keep engineers that both want to work on hard problems and stay up until 4am to push/support them. Best time to push, first hours I'm arriving, had a cup of joe, and have had a good night's sleep to work out any further mental bugs.
tzs 14y ago
> When exactly is a good time for Google to release code? Facebook? Twitter? These are global markets The overwhelming vast majority of the world's population lives between approximately 120 west longitude and 120 east longitude. That's just 2/3 of Earth. If you take a globe and orient it so you are staring at the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you won't see very much land. This means that even sites that are truly global should still have a strong 24 hour cyclic variation in their traffic.
- thezilch 14y ago
  That's true, but anecdotal data would give me at least half your peaks are still online. Definitely higher for sites like Google. Is it really worth the other "non-continuous deployment" risks to not deploy against a quarter of your base? Let's say you really have a lower-bound of half your upper-bound; what if your deploy is only going to go south with somewhere in between? Now your engineer not only stayed up until 2am PST, but he is getting woken up at 6am PST to fix a hellstorm.

jonknee 14y ago

The best time to deploy is the time with the best engineers at the ready. If you're updating component X, you should do so when the stakeholders of X are online. It sounds like Google was able to solve things quickly, I don't think deploying at another time would have been any better.

zalew 14y ago
> The best time to deploy is the time with the best engineers at the ready. or to put it simple: not at 1700 on friday.
babarock 14y ago
I'd even argue that the best time to deploy is during the best engineers' working hours. At least you guarantee they're around when/if things go bad. And by "best", I don't mean all stars (a la Fitzpatrick, Norvig, Pike or other Google celebs), but the engineer who actually followed the whole project/patch from dev environment to production.
thezilch 14y ago
Absolutely, I started editing in a quip about how unscalable, even for Google, to keep engineers that both want to work on hard problems and stay up until 4am to push/support them. Best time to push, first hours I'm arriving, had a cup of joe, and have had a good night's sleep to work out any further mental bugs.

tzs 14y ago

> When exactly is a good time for Google to release code? Facebook? Twitter? These are global markets The overwhelming vast majority of the world's population lives between approximately 120 west longitude and 120 east longitude. That's just 2/3 of Earth. If you take a globe and orient it so you are staring at the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you won't see very much land. This means that even sites that are truly global should still have a strong 24 hour cyclic variation in their traffic.

thezilch 14y ago
That's true, but anecdotal data would give me at least half your peaks are still online. Definitely higher for sites like Google. Is it really worth the other "non-continuous deployment" risks to not deploy against a quarter of your base? Let's say you really have a lower-bound of half your upper-bound; what if your deploy is only going to go south with somewhere in between? Now your engineer not only stayed up until 2am PST, but he is getting woken up at 6am PST to fix a hellstorm.