There are not different ‘DevOps’ methodologies. DevOps is a concept that involves tools, process, people, and cultural shifts.
CI/CD (continuous delivery) can be leveraged by any change that can be scripted, as well as automated testing on nearly everything.
The only exception is hardware, but even with hardware, HCI allows you to streamline most of these processes as well.
So much this. I don’t run the companies, but I’ve worked development for several and ran a few of the teams. Every company I’ve worked for has been different, with vastly different needs and infinitely different markets and requirements.
Some maintenances and rollouts were done overnight, some during the day. It all depends on the million moving parts for each situation. I’ve also worked the other side of the fence supporting the end users who have to perform maintenance/upgrades/changes during the day because they were critical issues that had to be resolved asap. I mean, generalizing every company in the world and saying they can all fit a cookie cutter maintenance is very asinine and, imo, shows OP might not actually have the creds they say they do.
Additionally, I would think the lowest impact to the playerbase is exactly when they are performing their maintenance each week. Anecdotally everyone I know who plays this game are either students or employees who are at work or school during these hours anyway.
I’m the last person you will ever meet to simp for Blizz but I will 100% die with them on this hill.
This is the crux of the issue. No matter what decision is made, players come out in droves to defend it. I don’t get it. As customers we should always want more for what we pay for everyone paying. What is a minor inconvenience to one person may be a major one to someone else. Players here constantly belittle or demean the opinions of other players while inflating their own.
I work with a number of large retail sites and being down for even minutes is enough to spark huge conversations and possibly lasting ramifications. I get it’s a very different model, but I’d have to assume that down time still equates to lost revenue for them. I know there is a lot to it, but as you say, the experience on the whole is really odd given how long they have been around, the size of the company, and honestly how many times they have had to do this prior.
The sad part is I think they can just… get away with it and it’s simply a cheap way to deploy. I just imagine some sweaty interns in a hot server room frantically updating things and wondering when they’ll get to see the sun again.
#TheyTakeANap
DevOps is an operational model.
It IMPLEMENTS methodologies. There are many decision points to be made there.
You cannot script every change. You cannot perform automated testing on everything. Development is more complicated than that, and humans need to be involved every step of the way!
Consider the SHEER SIZE of the codebase of WoW, an application that has been in development since 1998. There’s going to be a lot of considerations with even the most minor of changes, and much of the codebase may not be responsive to modern automated testing tools.
Just… consider for a minute what you are dealing with here.
Hello OP . I too am cursed with knowing how everything is ,was, and should be… its a burden we both share yet must carry alone… Godspeed my kindred spirit.
In this thread, an OP who is the founder of everything code and deployment. And Us, insignificant insects who never want the game we actively pay for to improve.
/s
I don’t even think it’s likely cheaper for them. It’s merely an initial investment to improve but probably has cost savings over an extended period of time on the labor costs. Automation tends to almost always work this way.
I agree that I think video game companies get away with it because it’s simply ‘accepted’ by people who come out to defend poor customer experience. Any other industry, this would be unacceptable.
I find it intriguing.
Reason 1: It’s a work day for bkizz employees so they, you know, work
Reason 2: more people play at night than during the day when, again, people are working.
He sounds like the CEO at my last job. Guy touted himself as an “old school engineer”, thought everything could only work a certain way and that certain way hasn’t changed since the early 80s. Funny part is that the company he is CEO of is a big name in the VoIP/Telecom world. He made every situation infinitely more difficult to handle. Point of fact he couldn’t figure out how to use an iPhone so our IT department was forced to scour ebay for a month to buy boxes of old Blackberry phones as backups for when he would break his. We shipped a few of them out to each separate facility in the US just in case.
You don’t understand DevOps at all so please stop. You can script nearly every change in 2020 and definitely automate testing on those items. The one-offs that might not be able to be scripted would be extremely limited to physical hardware.
Humans do not need to be involved in every step of the way. Amazon rebuilds their entire web farm every 11 seconds from scratch. Literally.
These threads are always funny. Everyone is so quick to sharpen their ego.
And everyone, including the OP a lot of times, is suddenly an expert in software deployment.
The amount of sweat on this forum sometimes is absolutely astounding, more than you would see walking into a gym or a locker room after a sporting event.
The amount of people arguing over something completely speculatory that we would never get an answer for is incredible.
Gonna need lots of popcorn for this one.
You can automate processes and leverage offshore for off-hours operations.
Also, anecdotal. There’s research articles that show the least played time is 5-10am.
Oh my goodness. You’ve never written a single line of code or executed a single PowerShell cmdlet. I’m convinced of it now.
Totally convinced. Kappa. DeVeLoPmEnT iS sO hArD
Not to mention, I’ve literally built many powershell training courses and done low-level and high-level development. In fact, my degree is in Computer Engineering so… I think you’re in fact ignorant on all of these topics.
Nope. Not buying it. No developer or sysadmin worth their salt would be saying “we can automate/script everything ever and none of this stuff is ever difficult”.
Especially not when talking about a massively complicated codebase that is over 22 years old.
My inquiring mind wants to know: why is Weekly Reset the same day as Maintenance? Has it always been this way? Technically is it necessary? Is it easier? Or was it totally arbitrary?
Since thats the first half of many people’s work days, and is literally Blizz’s stated maintenance window, I’m going to assume you’re conceding this point.
You are assuming they don’t at the same time as admitting in your op that you don’t work in the same industry and don’t know how things like this work. How can you say you lack information and in the next breath criticize your assumed/imagined outcome?
According to Blizzard, capacity research shows that is when the fewest number of people are playing.
That was established back in 2004. It’s probably just a tradition now.
Yah its like the modern day version of an armchair sportsman/coach. I find it entertaining lol.