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Discussion on: Explain Required Downtime Like I'm Five

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Alyss 💜 • Edited

One of the common instances I've seen is a deployment model that doesn't support an active code version. You'd likely have to be working with software 15+ years old to encounter that model. During downtime, the new code commits are incorporated into production and brought back online.

If the upgrade requires a lot of human intervention, that could be another reason for required downtime.

Downtime for a co-located team is at night or over lunch depending on how quick or integrated the process is.

A great example (imo) is Blizzard (World of Warcraft) vs ArenaNet (Guild Wars). My assumption is that Guild Wars incorporated a rollover model before World of Warcraft did. This allowed them to use an existing game dialog to ask players to move to a new realm instance that was more populated or force them to move. Source