Why do servers “go down” for routine maintenance? Is there not a backup where traffic can route?
In: 6
TLDR: Backup systems cost money… a lot of money
That really depends on how your build your system
Doing rolling updates or zero downtime changes is possible if you have a system built accordingly, but not everyone can afford that nor is it always feasible.
Large scale clusters like Google, Reddit, Ebay, etc do this. They update systems in such a way that only a handful of servers are down at a time so that the site can maintain it’s uptime.
Smaller companies that only have 1 server can’t afford to increase their costs 10x fold to have this kind of redundancy.
Sometimes systems aren’t designed with that in mind and it becomes increasingly difficult to add that functionality in later on when the system grows.
While larger systems often have to perform controlled shutdowns because they have a single point of failure like a database. When the database has to be taken offline to be updated you have to take down everything.
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