Release It!, 2nd Edition

The Fallacy of Planned Downtime

Throughout this book, our fundamental premise is that version 1.0 is the beginning of the system’s life. That means we shouldn’t plan for one or a few deployments to production, but many upon many. Once upon a time, we wrote our software, zipped it up, and threw it over the wall to operations so they could deploy it. If they were nice, then maybe we would add in some release notes about whatever new configuration options they should set. Operations would schedule some “planned downtime” to execute the release.

I hate the phrase “planned downtime.” Nobody ever clues the users in on the plan. To the users, downtime is downtime. The internal email you sent announcing the downtime doesn’t matter a bit to your users. ...