> Downtime for upgrades impacts everyone. Just because you're small scale doesn't mean your users don't expect (possibly contractually) availability.
I don't understand this mindset. Every tiny startup thinks they need zero downtime migrations.
At the same time, major banks and government institutions just announce maintenance windows. They just pick a time when few people use the service and then shut the whole system off for a few hours.
Sure, it's nice if your service is never down. But I'm also pretty sure that most customers prefer paying for new features rather than preparing for zero downtime migrations.
Also, considering how long PostgreSQL versions are supported, you only need to do major version upgrades every five years or so.
We're a small transport company, trying to get employees to and from work. No matter the time of day, there are always people commuting (or planning to commute). When's a good time for outage?
Imagine it's 3:30am, you just got off a shift, you can't afford a cab and the nearest subway is 10KM away. How fun is it that the transport app you rely on it down for maintenance?
I'm pretty sure I could deal with my commuting app being down for planned maintenance once a year for 3 hours. Especially if I got prior notification.
What's a good time for outage? I don't know anything about your app. You could do a database query and look for 3 hour intervals where less than 10 people are using your app. If those happen at regular times, those would be good candidate times for planned maintenance.
If you can't find a time slot like that, because you always have a significant number of people using your app at any time of day every day of the year, and the impact of a planned maintenance window would be significant to your customers, then you are probably at a scale where it makes sense to think about zero downtime migrations.
But to be honest, I think that 90% of startups don't fall into that category. I've seen founders that wasted time on multi master replication and automatic scaling just because it was fun to think about, before they even had any data or customers...
I don't understand this mindset. Every tiny startup thinks they need zero downtime migrations.
At the same time, major banks and government institutions just announce maintenance windows. They just pick a time when few people use the service and then shut the whole system off for a few hours.
Sure, it's nice if your service is never down. But I'm also pretty sure that most customers prefer paying for new features rather than preparing for zero downtime migrations.
Also, considering how long PostgreSQL versions are supported, you only need to do major version upgrades every five years or so.