Why are cloud upgrades so slow?
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I just upgraded our deployment on Business Cloud from 1.36.4 to 1.36.8, and it was down for nearly 5 minutes.
As far as I know, there were no schema changes. Why does it take so long?
You can't expect customers to pay over a thousand dollars a month just so that their authentication system doesn't go down for a substantial amount of time.
Is this something to do with the current stack? Java? Surely it's just replacing some files and then maybe restarting the app? Which part is taking the most time? Can certain things be skipped during the startup process?
Are there plans to improve this situation? (I don't mean full n-1, just a substantial improvement in upgrade time for updates with no changes to the database.)
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@glen ,
Thanks for your question and I really appreciate the other feedback you've given us (on GitHub and here).
While I'm not going to go into the details of the cloud upgrade process, we don't just swap out the installation; there's some other things that happen to ensure upgrades are robust.
We've outlined the downtime expectations here so that it's transparent for everyone and they can choose options that work for them.
I'd also point out that you control the upgrade timing and if you upgrade every single major release (we average about 10/year) that is approximately 50 minutes of downtime, which is 99.99% uptime (that's a ball park, of course, assuming no other downtime and no major database changes that make the upgrade longer).
Finally, I'll pass on your feedback to the engineering team.
