> No amount of downtime - scheduled or otherwise - is acceptable for a service like Knock<p>doubt.jpeg<p>If you have a complex system, you have incidents, you have downtime. A 15min downtime window announced in advance is fine for approximately 100% of SaaS businesses. You're not a hospital and you're not the power station. So much fake work gets done because people think their services are more important than they are. The engineering time you invested into this, invested into the product, or in making the rest of your dev team faster, would've likely made your users much happier. Specially if you can queue your notifications up and catch up after the downtime window.<p>If you have enterprise contracts with SLAs defining paybacks for 15min downtime windows, then I guess you could justify it, but most people don't. And like I mentioned, you likely already have a handful of incidents of the same or higher duration in practice anyway.<p>This is specially relevant with database migrations where the difference in work to create a migration of "little downtime" to "zero downtime" is usually significant. In this case though, seeing as this was a one time thing (newer versions of PostgreSQL on RDS allow it out of the box) it is specially hard to justify in my opinion, as opposed to if this was going to be reused across many versions or many databases powering the service.