Welcome to Modern Digital Business!
April 13, 2023

Don’t Depend on Maintenance Windows

What happens when a web application you depend on goes offline? It can be inconvenient, disappointing, and potentially cause serious problems for you.

But what if you find out that the web application wasn’t working by design because it was “down for maintenance”? That only makes the situation worse!

Your customers expect your application to be operational when they need it, not when you find it convenient. Maintenance windows impose your schedule on your customers and can negatively impact their experience.

And there is no reason for it! A well-designed, well-operated, modern web application never…ever…has to be down for scheduled maintenance.

In this episode, we’ll discuss why maintenance windows are a thing of the past.

 

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About Lee

Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, public speaker, and recognized thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee has been widely quoted in multiple technology publications, including InfoWorld, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone, and has been a featured speaker at events across the globe.

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This episode is based in part on an article I wrote that was published in InfoWorld

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Transcript

Lee Atchison:

What happens when a web application you depend on

 

Lee Atchison:

goes offline? It can be inconvenient, disappointing and

 

Lee Atchison:

potentially cause serious problems for you.

 

Lee Atchison:

But what if you find out that the web application wasn't

 

Lee Atchison:

working by design, because it was down for maintenance? That

 

Lee Atchison:

only makes the situation worse. Your customers expect your

 

Lee Atchison:

application to be operational when they need it. Not when you

 

Lee Atchison:

find a convenient maintenance windows impose your schedule on

 

Lee Atchison:

your customers, and can negatively impact their

 

Lee Atchison:

experience. And there is no reason for it. A well designed,

 

Lee Atchison:

well operated modern web application never ever has to be

 

Lee Atchison:

down for scheduled maintenance. In this episode, we'll discuss

 

Lee Atchison:

why maintenance windows are a thing of the past. Are you

 

Lee Atchison:

ready? Let's go.

 

Voiceover:

This is the modern digital business podcast, the

 

Voiceover:

technical Leaders Guide to modernizing your applications

 

Voiceover:

and digital business. Whether you're a business technology

 

Voiceover:

leader, or a small business innovator, keeping up with the

 

Voiceover:

digital business revelation is a must here to help make it easier

 

Voiceover:

with actionable insights and recommendations, as well as

 

Voiceover:

thoughtful interviews with industry experts, Lee Atchison.

 

Lee Atchison:

Several years ago, I purchased a digital smart

 

Lee Atchison:

thermostat for my home, I wanted to be able to set the

 

Lee Atchison:

temperature remotely and check on it when I wasn't at home.

 

Lee Atchison:

Basic requirements of a smart thermostat nowadays.

 

Lee Atchison:

I set it up and connected it to the manufacturers cloud back

 

Lee Atchison:

end. All was fine. Or so I thought.

 

Lee Atchison:

A couple of weeks later, I received an email from the

 

Lee Atchison:

manufacturer about the upcoming upgrade of their back end cloud

 

Lee Atchison:

service.

 

Lee Atchison:

During the time of the upgrade, which was going to last for

 

Lee Atchison:

several months, the company would be bringing down its

 

Lee Atchison:

applications for quote many hours at a time and would do so

 

Lee Atchison:

at quote various times during the day.

 

Lee Atchison:

They wouldn't commit to specific days and times, just that they

 

Lee Atchison:

would be bringing the system down for a while, seemingly

 

Lee Atchison:

randomly, many times over the next several months. The

 

Lee Atchison:

company, of course, apologized in advance for the

 

Lee Atchison:

inconvenience.

 

Lee Atchison:

Yeah, right.

 

Lee Atchison:

What was that all about?

 

Lee Atchison:

at seemingly random times, my thermostat would stop working

 

Lee Atchison:

for many hours at a time. And this would go on for months. I

 

Lee Atchison:

don't think so. The very next day, I replaced the thermostat

 

Lee Atchison:

with one from another company throughout the old one and wrote

 

Lee Atchison:

them a scathing negative review, there is no way I would deal

 

Lee Atchison:

with that level of bad service.

 

Lee Atchison:

Available availability matters.

 

Lee Atchison:

Let's look at another example. In order to receive certain

 

Lee Atchison:

disability benefits that he's eligible for, my son has to

 

Lee Atchison:

report his income to the US government. To do that he uses

 

Lee Atchison:

an application on his cell phone. Once a month, he logs

 

Lee Atchison:

into the application to report his income for the previous

 

Lee Atchison:

month.

 

Lee Atchison:

This iPhone application, however, has a major problem

 

Lee Atchison:

with it.

 

Lee Atchison:

When you launch the application at the wrong time of the day, it

 

Lee Atchison:

shows you a message. The message says this application only works

 

Lee Atchison:

between the hours of 8am to 5pm. Eastern Time, Monday through

 

Lee Atchison:

Friday.

 

Lee Atchison:

Hmm, what is that? That's right, this online SAS based web

 

Lee Atchison:

application only operates during, quote normal business

 

Lee Atchison:

hours. This obviously makes the application very hard to use.

 

Lee Atchison:

Why would they restrict the hours that you'd use an

 

Lee Atchison:

application like this?

 

Lee Atchison:

As a government institution, they undoubtedly figured they

 

Lee Atchison:

didn't want to let the application run when nobody was

 

Lee Atchison:

in the office to support it. After all, how could they

 

Lee Atchison:

possibly fix anything that went wrong if they weren't in the

 

Lee Atchison:

office?

 

Lee Atchison:

Availability matters.

 

Lee Atchison:

These two stories are extreme examples, but they represent

 

Lee Atchison:

examples of a common problem in many online applications. The

 

Lee Atchison:

company's operating the applications create maintenance

 

Lee Atchison:

windows, periods of time where they regularly bring the

 

Lee Atchison:

application offline in order to perform routine maintenance and

 

Lee Atchison:

upgrades. Wants to find they treat these windows like they

 

Lee Atchison:

are free downtime periods. They feel they are free to bring

 

Lee Atchison:

their applications down and work on

 

Lee Atchison:

Mmm. Without it counting is downtime.

 

Lee Atchison:

Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Downtime is

 

Lee Atchison:

downtime, whether it's planned, unexpected, or unplanned and

 

Lee Atchison:

unexpected if your customers want to use your application,

 

Lee Atchison:

and the application is not available for any reason, it's

 

Lee Atchison:

downtime.

 

Lee Atchison:

You cannot operate a modern digital online application or

 

Lee Atchison:

service without maintaining a high level of availability.

 

Lee Atchison:

When your customers want to use your service, they expect your

 

Lee Atchison:

service will be operational. They do not care about

 

Lee Atchison:

maintenance schedules, they do not tolerate downtime.

 

Lee Atchison:

They use your application when it's convenient for them, not

 

Lee Atchison:

when it's convenient for you. It's bad enough when a real

 

Lee Atchison:

application failure causes your availability to suffer. But

 

Lee Atchison:

planning and having downtime in the form of a maintenance window

 

Lee Atchison:

is just formalizing customer dissatisfaction.

 

Lee Atchison:

In these modern times, with the tools and services that are

 

Lee Atchison:

available for modern cloud native application development,

 

Lee Atchison:

there is simply no reason why a digital application should

 

Lee Atchison:

require any sort of downtime at all, for any maintenance or

 

Lee Atchison:

upgrade. In today's world, it's unnecessary. From a customer's

 

Lee Atchison:

point of view, it is unacceptable.

 

Lee Atchison:

Almost any upgrade can be made live without any downtime. Even

 

Lee Atchison:

upgrades are required database schema changes and other data

 

Lee Atchison:

migration tasks can be implemented without requiring

 

Lee Atchison:

any downtime. maintenance tasks can be performed while the

 

Lee Atchison:

application continues to operate. There is no longer any

 

Lee Atchison:

valid reason for you to plan on bringing your modern application

 

Lee Atchison:

down.

 

Lee Atchison:

And if your application does require maintenance windows, due

 

Lee Atchison:

to some historical architectural issue with your application,

 

Lee Atchison:

they used to treat this as what it is a serious problem. This is

 

Lee Atchison:

technical debt imposed on your application that is costing your

 

Lee Atchison:

company money. Your customers don't care why your application

 

Lee Atchison:

is down. They just care that it is down. as your application

 

Lee Atchison:

grows and expands it will be harder to justify having a

 

Lee Atchison:

regular downtime window. customer usage patterns expand

 

Lee Atchison:

and customers expect the application to operate at all

 

Lee Atchison:

times of the day and night.

 

Lee Atchison:

Additionally, building systems and processes for your

 

Lee Atchison:

development organization that don't require the use of

 

Lee Atchison:

maintenance windows encourages them to adhere to deployment and

 

Lee Atchison:

operational best practices. You see, we developers tend to get

 

Lee Atchison:

lazy when we act like we know we have maintenance windows

 

Lee Atchison:

available for our years. designing and implementing

 

Lee Atchison:

changes that don't require a maintenance window requires

 

Lee Atchison:

additional time and thought, which encourages better

 

Lee Atchison:

attention to detail and to best practices. When developers are

 

Lee Atchison:

required to think about the operational impact of a change,

 

Lee Atchison:

they tend to produce fewer operational problems than when

 

Lee Atchison:

they simply throw it into production and not consider the

 

Lee Atchison:

ramifications when you depend on maintenance windows. Ultimately,

 

Lee Atchison:

overall quality and availability suffers. Even if you currently

 

Lee Atchison:

have easily identifiable low usage times during which you

 

Lee Atchison:

feel you can afford to bring your application down. That

 

Lee Atchison:

doesn't mean that those same low usage times will be available to

 

Lee Atchison:

you as you expand and grow. International expansion products

 

Lee Atchison:

that expansion, customer base expansion can all contribute to

 

Lee Atchison:

increased need for 24 by seven availability. A previous client

 

Lee Atchison:

of mine regularly scheduled a two hour maintenance window each

 

Lee Atchison:

week, so they can perform upgrades and data adjustments

 

Lee Atchison:

while allowing them to keep operating normally the rest of

 

Lee Atchison:

the time. The problem is the maintenance window is by itself

 

Lee Atchison:

a major hit to their availability. a two hour

 

Lee Atchison:

maintenance window means that the greatest availability they

 

Lee Atchison:

can offer their customers was 98.8%. By definition, you will

 

Lee Atchison:

not be able to operate greater than 98.8% of the time by

 

Lee Atchison:

comparison to other online applications 98.8% is a horrible

 

Lee Atchison:

statistic. For example, the Amazon s3 service guarantees 99

 

Lee Atchison:

Point 99% service availability, their data integrity SLA is even

 

Lee Atchison:

higher than that. This guarantee amounts to a maximum of 61

 

Lee Atchison:

seconds of downtime each week. In order for s3 to make this SLA

 

Lee Atchison:

consistently, they can never planned to have any downtime for

 

Lee Atchison:

any maintenance ever. Any outage at all will cause them to fail

 

Lee Atchison:

their contracted SLA. And they back up their SLA policy with

 

Lee Atchison:

money. If Amazon s3 is down just a mere 4.3 minutes in any given

 

Lee Atchison:

month, then AWS will refund 10% of everyone's storage costs for

 

Lee Atchison:

the entire month. As you can imagine, this would be a

 

Lee Atchison:

significant amount of revenue loss for Amazon. And it's not

 

Lee Atchison:

just s3. It's a mindset across all of AWS and across all of

 

Lee Atchison:

Amazon. This commitment is ingrained in the minds of every

 

Lee Atchison:

engineer that works at Amazon. You build everything so that no

 

Lee Atchison:

downtime is ever needed. No matter what the change to the

 

Lee Atchison:

system involves no downtime ever.

 

Lee Atchison:

Yes, 99.99% is a high level of availability to guarantee and

 

Lee Atchison:

not every company needs that level for their business to

 

Lee Atchison:

thrive. But even at a lower percentage of availability,

 

Lee Atchison:

there's no room for planned maintenance windows. 99%

 

Lee Atchison:

availability means 1.6 hours per week of maximum downtime. 99.9%

 

Lee Atchison:

availability, which is pretty reasonable, means 10 minutes per

 

Lee Atchison:

week of maximum downtime, and 99.99% availability means less

 

Lee Atchison:

than 61 seconds per week of maximum downtime. Even at these

 

Lee Atchison:

lower availability levels. A planned two hour maintenance

 

Lee Atchison:

window each week means your application will always always

 

Lee Atchison:

fail its SLA. Now some companies don't count planned downtime as

 

Lee Atchison:

official downtime, but you can bet that your customers do And

 

Lee Atchison:

isn't that what really matters. Thank you for tuning in to

 

Lee Atchison:

modern digital business. This podcast exists because of the

 

Lee Atchison:

support of you my listeners. If you enjoy what you hear, please

 

Lee Atchison:

leave a review on Apple podcasts or directly on our website at

 

Lee Atchison:

mdb.fm/reviews. And if you'd like to record a quick question

 

Lee Atchison:

or comment, click the Microphone icon in the lower right hand

 

Lee Atchison:

corner of our website. Your recording might be featured on a

 

Lee Atchison:

future episode. Make sure you get every new episode when they

 

Lee Atchison:

become available. Click subscribe and your favorite

 

Lee Atchison:

podcast player or check out our website@mdb.fm If you want to

 

Lee Atchison:

learn more from me to check out one of my books, courses or

 

Lee Atchison:

articles by going to Lee atchison.com. And all of these

 

Lee Atchison:

links are included in the show notes. Thank you for listening

 

Lee Atchison:

and welcome to the world of the modern digital business.