Why you should expect more online outages but less downtime

[Commentary] Gmail went down for 18 minutes during prime e-mail checking hours on the West Coast thanks to a routine software update conducted Dec 10. But in an era of continuous code deployment Google’s midmorning update isn’t unusual — it’s the future.

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? The second category is economic. When you wait to deploy your code in these massive quarterly installs, you’re deciding to avoid the efficiencies that the new code could bring to the site today.
• The third school of thought is popularized by Netflix and is basically an invitation to break things because a system that is so fragile that one code upgrade brings it down, clearly isn’t resilient enough.
• Some sites actively try to break their systems regularly so they find the weak spots. That’s the rationale behind those software updates that might cause a momentary web service outage or two.