When Do You Deploy?

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item When Do You Deploy?

  • Our JDE changes occur mid-month on Thursday evenings. Why? That is the window Finance gave us.

    Most interesting window I have ever seen was where the app ran on a server also controlling a factory floor - we could roll out upgrades annually on Xmas day.:w00t:

    The application ran 24x7 on DEC VAX / VMS...

  • Best time (for deployment too) is when boss is out.

    My boss goes to holidays tommorow, our director is in spa. Life is beautiful.



    See, understand, learn, try, use efficient
    © Dr.Plch

  • ChrisP-374390 (2/18/2010)


    Most interesting window I have ever seen was where the app ran on a server also controlling a factory floor - we could roll out upgrades annually on Xmas day.:w00t:

    The application ran 24x7 on DEC VAX / VMS...

    This is VERY familiar to me - I am a bit of a database lightweight, but our company provides process control systems for the chemical and paints manufacturing industry - I think I've NOT had to work through the Xmas holiday (vacation) only about 3 times in the last 10 years 🙂

    Easter is another time when we quite often get roll-outs.

    Kelsey Thornton
    MBCS CITP

  • Surely this depends entirely on the usage patterns of the affected systems? We have some servers that are used mainly in the morning (eg 7am - 2pm) so we can often do maintenance during the late afternoon. Other servers aren't used until later in the day so we can do stuff first thing in the morning. Still other servers are used mainly for overnight loading/processing so we can take those down in the middle of the working day.

    I guess if you're supporting internal systems used by other office workers then you're mainly going to be doing maintenance overnight. But for systems used by clients who don't necessarily work 9-5 you need to be more flexible.

    -----
    JL

  • I have found that for platforms that support global customers, just before Europe comes online seems to be the most suitable time as this is when the lowest volume of traffic "tends" to be experienced,

    So before the US and APAC come online.....

  • all out of hours, mostly weekends. We have an 'application weekend' and an 'infrastructure weekend' but there is flexibility.

    If the work involves an outage we can't even touch non-prod boxes during working hours.

    Gets tiring at times.

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------

  • For us its weekends only for a major upgrade (once a quarter).

    If its a small patch fix we can go on a weekday, but in the early morning (European) time.

    D.

  • With global access of most of our systems and engineers doing work at odd hours of the day & night, all around the world, we don't have a good time for down time. So, with input from the business, it was decided that hot fixes & minor updates would go out on Wednesday's in the evening EST. Major work is done over the weekend. I'm getting ready to retire an Oracle database (and yes, I like saying that) and start the app on SQL Server 2008 tomorrow (Saturday) morning.

    I used to work for a dot com that was also 24/7. After analyzing access to the system, we tried to do major maintenance at 3AM on Sunday mornings because that was the time that we had the least number of people on the system.

    I can't imagine taking down a system in the middle of the work day, on purpose, unless it was a dire emergency.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
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    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

  • Our schedule is usually every other Thursday evening for patches or minor version upgrades. Usually one Saturday a quarter for a major release. The thinking for Thursday is that we have Friday to fix anything or rollback and then the weekend if needed, but since they are only minor releases, fixes/rollbacks are usually fairly quick (and rare). Major releases on Saturday's get the affected user community in to test the move to production, allowing part of Saturday/all of Sunday to fix or rollback. It works for us.

    -- You can't be late until you show up.

  • Well, we are too small to need to worry about these things. One server with a 10 gb database, if I need to do some maintenance I normally first do it on a test database and check how long it takes etc. then I let the managers know and I can actually do that in working hours and stop all users from working mostly 1/2 an hour. Major stuf does not happen much but then we do it after hours or weekends.

    :-PManie Verster
    Developer
    Johannesburg
    South Africa

    I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. - Holy Bible
    I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times. - Everett Mckinley Dirkson (Well, I am trying. - Manie Verster)

  • I work at a fortune 50 company but we are pretty decentralized. For our IT dept. we are forbidden from weekend upgrades. As long as it is a scheduled update at least 2 days out we have a window nightly (Tues- Fri) from 2:05 AM until 5:55 AM.

  • Usually at lunch or near end of day when other people have left for about 30 minutes. Or during employee break time for those that run 24/7. Never on weekends. The only thing that needs to be done on weekends or a holiday is to schedule a full reindex of the databases.

  • Minor software patches from the vendor get applied as released, be it weekday or weekend, at 10 p.m. CST. Major software updates get applied in TEST and ran for one week before applied to production. Then it's done Friday nights beginning at 10 p.m. CST. This allows for system testing after the update is complete and leaves us the weekend to roll back or fix should a major error occur. But that's why we run for a full week in TEST and document anything that comes up so we can be prepared for the PRODUCTION. Knock on wood, the last 4 major updates have taken only a few hours and two of those hours are spent applying MS patches.

    The software vendor publishes a weekly list of approved MS patches and those are applied only prior to major updates.

    The distance between genius and insanity is measured only by success.

  • Being a "county" staff member, our systems are on a really 'slow growth' schedule and fortunately are really stable. My biggest update time, each month, is MS critical updates for either the server OS or SQL. I like to wait until the second Sunday AFTER "MS Tuesday" to apply these updates. I normally schedule from 9:00 AM to Noon on that Sunday. Since almost all of the systems I handle must be

    available for citizen use (web servers) and county business (7:00 AM to 5:00 PM), it is very difficult

    for me to schedule any time outside of Sunday morning.

    Since I've been doing this now for about the past six years and it has turned out to be the best time for me and the users. While we do have some users that "dial in" via CITRIX at night and on weekends, it helps that CITRIX is on one of my servers as well, so there is "ALWAYS" CITRIX maintenance on those Sundays that I update the other servers.....heheheheh.

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