Cloud Computing: Why you should expect more online outages but less downtime
December 17, 2012
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.
Gmail went down for 18 minutes during prime email checking hours on the West Coast thanks to a routine software update conducted Monday morning. But in an era of continuous code deployment Google’s mid morning update isn’t unusual — it’s the future.
Google’s webmail service Gmail was down for 18 minutes last week after a “routine update” broke the service for a few minutes. The search giant reported that it conducted a routine update of its load balancing software between 8:45 AM PT and 9:13 AM PT and after the problems were detected managed to quickly roll back the buggy code. But this didn’t stop some people from questioning why Google would roll out a software update at what are peak email-checking hours on the West Coast…
The answer is that most of the coders behind today’s popular web sites and services are deploying their code when it’s ready — not at some pre-determined point when downtime may not be noticed. It’s called continuous code deployment or some variation on that theme and everyone from Facebook and Netflix to smaller services do it. So while it may occasionally cause a few blips, those blips should be shorter and less catastrophic.
There’s no good time for downtime in an always-on world
The rationale for doing these sorts of continuous deployments vary, but most fall into four categories. The first is that there really is no good time for downtime anymore, but if you break it, wouldn’t you rather have happy and awake staff on the clock ready to fix it? Jesse Robbins, the chief community officer of Opscode points out that even good times for downtime can vary across customers…
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/why-you-should-expect-more-online-outages-but-less-downtime/