[zzen]

They have a separate EU hosting region that has separate maintenance (and uptime that's actually significantly better then US region): https://status.heroku.com/uptime?region=EU

So yeah, it was a lame time to schedule maintenance.

[alrs]

I disagree, strongly.

If you've architected for IAAS you have sufficient redundancy and a plan for graceful degradation. I'd rather be dealing with an outage after lunch than at 4am.

[sparkman55]

This is exactly the "developer-centric" mindset that is, frankly, misguided.

Sure, I would rather deal with an outage during business hours, but that means that many of my Customers are also dealing with an outage. If the outage were at 4 AM, most of my Customers would be asleep, and wouldn't even notice the outage.

[alrs]

If you want NASA reliability, build a NASA-grade 24/7 operation across three timezones.

If your plan is just to have the nerds skip sleep periodically, you're an asshole.

[sparkman55]

Exactly! Heroku should be building that 24/7 operation so I don't have to. Isn't that the whole point of PaaS?

[alrs]

I'm sure that's the plan. But if you really really really need faultless 24/7 you're looking for something akin to "NASA as a service", and I assume that such a service wouldn't be able to invoice using something as pedestrian as a credit card.

[GVIrish]

You don't need to make your developers work a 24 hour cycle to do off hours maintenance. You plan ahead, give the team doing the update the day off before and give them a reasonable window to work with.

Maybe I'm wrong but if a deployment goes wrong at peak hours it's going to amount to a lot more lost money for the customer than it will if a deployment goes wrong at off hours. If you cost your customers money with an outage they're not going to care that you scheduled a developer-centric maintenance window.