[mlthoughts2018]

Yes, I work in a high traffic (Alexa rank above 400) ecommerce site specializing in stock photography, music and digital assets. We see a 10-15x spike around Black Friday, around Christmas to New Years, both in direct consumer sales, inventory upload, new sign ups (customers and sellers) and in ad inventory sales.

We don’t do code freezes except in very special, isolated cases of known failure risk. When we do need an isolated code freeze for one system, that is a “all hands on deck, this had better get fixed” kind of moment. If the larger system of most of our core services needed an extended code freeze to be safe, that would result in probably (justifiably) firing senior engineering leaders.

If you have a CI/CD system and you can’t trust normal automated deploys at any time, that is a huge problem. If this happened one year and you needed the code freeze, so be it - that’s just responsible risk assessment. If you intentionally plan the system to work this way every year that is egregiously bad engineering leadership.