Comments on: Who upgrades their software on a Thursday evening?

By: Ivan Chalif

Ivan Chalif — Sat, 03 May 2008 21:04:02 +0000

When I worked in SaaS, we had upgrades on the weekends. We published the upgrade windows in advance (2nd and 4th Saturdays, if I recall). We didn’t always do an upgrade, but customers knew that was the window they would occur in, so that they could plan accordingly.

Now that I work with on-premise products, we typically release our software on any day, Monday-Thursday. Since our customers install the software at their location on their schedule, they can select whatever time/day they want. We don’t roll out our releases on Fridays to avoid any last minute issues that require rolling folks into the office (metaphorically) on the weekend, should a customer choose to install on a Friday at 4pm and run into an issue.

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By: HelgeH

HelgeH — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:20:40 +0000

I know many companies do updates on thursday evenings. I believe the reason is that if there is a major problem it can be identified on the Friday, and hopefully fixed during the weekend. Also many SLA’s no only count downtime in business hours monday-friday and the risk is therefor lower.

By: saeed

saeed — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:55:43 +0000

Thanks for the insight Ja.

This is interesting. All of the SaaS companies I’ve dealt with have a clear weekend (Friday night or Saturday night) policy for their updates etc.

Saeed

By: ja

ja — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:45:10 +0000

Well…the scenario I called out above is exactly our story. We have an enterprise SaaS offering where our Saturday/Sunday usage is almost nil and Monday is our heaviest traffic. This is one of the reasons why we will often plan for maintenance outages on Thursday. We do it later than 7:15 Pacific, but this schedule works well for us. We can get real world usage on a Friday where the impact of any issues that might have slipped through QA will be far less than they would be on a Monday. Doing it over the weekend doesn’t buy us anything since Sat/Sun site traffic is negligible.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:22:56 +0000

Maybe it wasn’t planned.

By: saeed

saeed — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:56:03 +0000

Hi,

Typically SaaS or hosted app companies will do this work some time over Saturday night in North America. This typically minimizes disruption for users regardless of location worldwide.

As for having Friday to test, well, that’s what Sunday morning is for.

Doing this on a Thursday evening is simply odd. I’ve never heard of SaaS or similar company having a planned outage midweek.

Saeed

By: ja

ja — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:40:18 +0000

Maybe Friday is their slowest day of the week and Monday is the busiest. This lets them get an eval of the release on Friday without the risk of having it really kill them on a Monday.

By: richardbeck

richardbeck — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:05:55 +0000

Because if there are any problems they can get them fixed during Friday and thus won’t have to work the weekend.