Experienced Devs

3950 readers

2 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

Logo base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Do your routine backend code releases require downtime? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Curious to know how many people do zero-downtime deployment of backend code and how many people regularly take their service down, even if very briefly, to roll out new code.

Zero-downtime deployment is valuable in some applications and a complete waste of effort in others, of course, but that doesn't mean people do it when they should and skip it when it's not useful.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Disclaimer: I work in the central Delivery Engineering org for a FAANG. Our system deploys somewhere in the range of 30-50,000 times per day through our system and the number of services that require downtime for an update I could count on one hand.

Downtime is completely unnecessary in modern service development. If I experience a product that uses downtime for deployments, I take it as an indicator that the product is immature and probably not built in a way that I want to depend on for personal or professional life.

I totally get for small businesses maybe downtime is a necessity because it does require additional effort, but if you're building a product or service that people depend on, it severely erodes trust and frustrates users.

Always release backwards-compatible changes. If you need to do a schema migration, ensure the DDL can be performed online and if it can't, dual write.