Re: OT: When to put things live

[graq]

If it were realistic, I would push the end time back to 15:00.

If you are writing from a (purely) development side, then that potentially leaves you with other teams in the mix (say a database management and operations teams). You may not have any access at all to any live machines, and you are reliant on these other departments to deploy your changes. That means you are reliant on them to help fix errors and roll back.

Also, as you mention DNS, it sounds like web development, and if you are UK based, then one of your peak traffic periods may be 16:00.

And this all ignores the times when you are implementing major changes (that might include hardware changes as well as software) where downtime is unavoidable (or highly likely). Then you must consider the user/customer base first and pick off-peak times in order not to cause long lasting damage to the business.

[simon.proctor]

> that potentially leaves you with other teams in the mix (say a database management and operations teams).

Almost true in my case. Unfortunately, there are no real database teams per se. The hardware team looks after hardware, makes sure the os is up and the capacity is ok. Beyond that, it is considered 'application' and out of their remit.

Because of that, I tend to get a little more say in the stuff that I do. I'm also lucky that most of what I do is internal to the business. However, as an international business we have 24 hour access requirements. This is where our SLAs come into play.

Downtime is inevitable but is generally mitigated as much as possible. I don't really mention it as downtime is a lot rarer for my work.

> As you mention DNS it sounds like web development

That is part of my work but i used DNS as an easy to understand example of not choosing a fixed time for launches.

Thanks for your comments :)