So what exactly goes on in scheduled maintenances?

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...

Comments

Liss_Bliss_

@Kabam Miike and Thel sit around having races to see who can drink the most Maple Syrup

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GroundedWisdom

Anything server-related. It can be anything from regular maintenance to adding new content.

Sw0rdMaster

Probably update the software, hardware or new patches.

Nitro422

It used to be every week....

DNA3000

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...

In general, in my experience it is usually one of three things. First, you can think of the game servers as having a "software" part and a "data" part. The software is an engine that uses the data to give us the game. A new champ is just a bunch of data they can load into the server software, and then bingo that champion now exists. But if that champion requires new game mechanics or new data structures that don't exist, that may require the underlying software itself to be patched or upgraded. Data can usually be loaded or changed on the fly. But the actual running software often needs to be shut down to be patched or upgraded. So that kind of stuff generally requires downtime.

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.

RU11011

I assume in this one they'll be fixing some visual bugs like Kingpin's sp2, as well as regular maintenance work said above

DGC

smdam38

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...
In general, in my experience it is usually one of three things. First, you can think of the game servers as having a "software" part and a "data" part. The software is an engine that uses the data to give us the game. A new champ is just a bunch of data they can load into the server software, and then bingo that champion now exists. But if that champion requires new game mechanics or new data structures that don't exist, that may require the underlying software itself to be patched or upgraded. Data can usually be loaded or changed on the fly. But the actual running software often needs to be shut down to be patched or upgraded. So that kind of stuff generally requires downtime.

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.

The "maintenance" in games like this is usually database related which doesn't make sense if you're using Google. They're very much about up time. Live updates are the norm and there's no reason for a 3 hour outage.

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.

Snurris

Maybe adjusting the AW season, removing points for war 5 this time?

RyanGolf

way too much time lost for 1hr timers after 3 1/2 hours. Most of my alliance is now asleep. please switch to 30 minute timer

Markjv81

Removal of basic catalyst quests lol

Zaosafler

It used to be every week....

It is server side maintenance. Some of the issues we have seen historically were probably the type that required a server rest to clear them temporarily. So they scheduled it every week. Issue was r3olved, no more weekly server boots.

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.