So what exactly goes on in scheduled maintenances?
Mathking13
Member Posts: 988 ★★★
We have scheduled maintenance pretty regularly (I mean today's is the first one for quite a while but I think you get my point) and we don't tend to be many if any visible effects of these scheduled maintenances.
So what exactly goes on with these maintenances? I'm really interested to know what happens...
So what exactly goes on with these maintenances? I'm really interested to know what happens...
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Second, there's infrastructure components. You have databases, application servers, etc, and some of this stuff uses general infrastructure that itself cannot be easily reconfigured or modified on the fly. Maybe you have a database server and changing data can be done on the fly, but the schema definitions for all the databases cannot be changed on the fly, so any change to those underlying databases requires downtime. Maybe you're changing the way the network load balances mobile clients into the game servers. Changes like that might need downtime.
And there's integration components. The game uses Google mobile play cloud stuff for example. The way the Kabam systems integrate with the Google cloud stuff might not be easy to modify in certain ways without downtime.
And sometimes downtime is necessary, and sometimes it is just easier to do certain kinds of work when things are shut down.
Lastly, there's a "non-change" that sometimes happens. Sometimes, even with large distributed virtual cloud based systems, someone thinks something is a little wonky and wants to reset something, but it is a component that cannot be brought down without a service interruption. So sometimes during scheduled maintenance some systems are just plain rebooted because someone thinks they need to, but no actual active change occurs.
If they're still using horribly old app servers, that's on them and should be pointed out. No reason to defend a bad practice from a company that makes hundreds of millions from their customers.
This is a regularly scheduled Block Time window - and someone is always going to be inconvenienced. It’s when non-emergency system resets are done, OS patching and upgrades, hardware maintenance that requires a shutdown, and other customer impacting server maintenance.