Deploying late at night at Memory Printing

This is to avoid any downtime for the end users. 

You know, those messages you see in your banking app or some of the SaaS products you’re using: “We'll be down for maintenance on 02.06.2034 between 10:00 and 12:30”.

While I’d find that approach more justified in the B2B segment, we sell DTC and I prefer to be careful with end customers.

Not only that, but we’re quite small as a business, so there's no complex deployment pipeline behind to span nodes & handle the build for a load balancer to then shift the traffic to another instance, with effectively no downtime. Put the app down, pull the changes, run the build, clear some cache & put everything back up. Fairly easy.

So, with the exception of major updates, I tend to plan the releases when there’s no one online. And because we sell to countries in the +/- 2 hours timezone, that’s easy to pull off.

Usually.

I’ve been working on a couple of patches on the app and was getting ready for the release, as per my SOP. But we’ve just started the Valentine’s Day campaign and I thought make sure that no one is online. Even if the build would’ve taken roughly 60-65 seconds.

Then I saw this.

7 countries.

Tens of people soaking in our ads, late at night, trying out the personalisation step and preparing their orders for Romance Capsule & Memory Notes.

It’s not hundreds of customers online. But hey, it's something.

This was just one of those moments when you should stop, smile and appreciate the present moment.

I’d better, because I still need to deploy a little bit later...