March 11, 2026 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item A Full Shutdown
March 11, 2026 at 8:58 am
It's certainly been a long time since we needed to do a full shutdown on any customer facing systems for upgrade purposes. Development systems occasionally.
March 11, 2026 at 9:43 am
Code deployments are usually live. We still have shutdowns when windows updates need to be installed
March 11, 2026 at 9:47 am
This is a case of "The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed".
Over the past couple of decades, I've seen shutdowns for major releases decline as architectural and software engineering approaches have evolved. Those changes reduce the likelihood and blast radius of risk.
Unlikely though it may be, if a risk becomes an issue, we have to consider the business impact. This is where I have seen the companies stay with shutdowns.
Change has inertia. Making the 1st shift away from shutdowns is the hardest. We have to earn the trust of decision makers who are conservative and comfortable with shutdowns. That trust can be fragile. There is also the challenge of having two approaches where there was once only one. Some changes require shutdowns, others don't, so in the early days, expect wrangling over which release is a shutdown candidate and which one is not.
March 11, 2026 at 11:40 am
The video is really deceiving.
F1 pit stops used to take a long time because they refueled the cars during the race, and the fuel came from a gravity-fed canister held up in the air by a pit crew member. It didn't make sense to tune any other part of the pitting process because the fuel could only go so quickly through the F1-mandated fuel systems.
Over time, there were so many fires (and injuries) due to spilled fuel that F1 banned refueling during the race and switched to larger fuel tanks in the cars.
Once refueling was banned, pit stops only took ~5 seconds for the tire changes. Sure, they've tuned the bejeezus out of tire changes to where they can now be under 2 seconds, but we're only talking about a difference of 5 seconds down to 2. Not as dramatic as the video makes it look.
The video is like comparing a version upgrade to an AG failover. 😀
March 12, 2026 at 3:51 pm
Brent's point is backed up by the theory of constraints. The theory is that you only have one critical bottleneck constraint at a time.
The more impressive motor racing feat is how fast the gearbox can be changed on a World Rally Car.
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