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.
I do not. I’ve got apps that go unused 5pm-9am or 1am-9am depending on the night, apps that have lower usage 5pm-8am and one app that’s basically unused 8am-5pm. Each one gets redeployed in its down time, with hours extra to rollback any problems.
Actual downtime is usually around twenty seconds which is fine except for emergency midday builds.
I’ve been trying to get zero downtime deployments, but it’s hard to justify the extra complexity when we’ve got such open service windows. Also, we’re likely to have more downtime from an ISP service outage than our midday builds.
Other teams have much shorter service windows but deployments that take the whole window.