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

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

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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.

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[–] pie 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.