What takes so long?

In 2022, we can stream movies from an airplane over the middle of an ocean. We can download and upload to servers across the world at incredible speeds. Major websites like Facebook & Google can do software updates without the end-user even knowing anything changed. We have software development practices like blue-green deployment that keep services online at all times. We can pre-download patches and keep them out of Production by using feature flags. We have remote heart rate monitoring systems that MUST stay online 24x7 even while doing updates …

And yet, Blizzard over here taking the fleet of servers offline for an entire day to push out an update. What could possibly take all day long?

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You clearly don’t do coding for a living or even for fun.

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Please, stop.

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What about my post makes that clear? I work in DevOps …

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preach dropped a bunch of pringles in the mainframe D:

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And WoW is a tangled knot of spaghetti code on a old engine. It happens

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Step one: use your brain for a moment and realize that Blizzard would not take their servers down for a second that they don’t have to

Step two: accept that the servers will be up when they’re up

Step three: find something else to do with your time. Fallout 3 is free right now on the Epic game store, if you’ve never played that I would highly recommend it.

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I’ve worked projects where the code base is out of date and a complete mess (multiple companies contributing to it, turned it into a Frankenstein of a mess). Even those projects prioritized CI CD Best practices which kept code deploying often and freely. Even if it’s an old beast, no software update in today’s age should take eight hours.

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DevOps. Whatever. Like the other guy said, you clearly have no idea how a massive roll out like this works.

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90% sure you didn’t even read my post. Trolls everywhere in here. I’m asking an honest question: what could take so long?

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I have been a Blizzard customer for so long that I have actually come to love the extended maintenances because of these types of posts.

The servers will be available when they are available. Like even if they were down for 48 hours, would you really not live? Would it be so awful?

Always a treat.

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I guess apply for a job there since you think you can do it better and it can’t be that hard or take that long. I guess they need someone else to show them just how to do it.

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Everyone who seems to know the answer, won’t explain it. Guess you’re another one of “those guys.” I work in code deployment. But that aside, educate me… tell me what’s so obvious that you figured out and nobody else did …

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Life is hard when you lonely.

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And your question was peppered with how other companies do so much better and how you’ve maintained such a large code bases without issues.

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And I’m giving you an honest answer: nobody is going to tell you. Live with it.

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Well, I can tell you that some patches could take a lot of time due to a different activities, every time my work has to implement a new SAP deployment, it could take between 6-8 hours. there’s a lot of configs that are just moved via an update, but there’s also Smoke testing, some configurations should be done manually directly in the system…etc

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Why do you assume people know why? There’s a 99.99% chance no one on these forums has ever worked for a company that has deployed a patch as massive as something like this, or even what is being deployed. There could be additional stuff in the back ground.

Why even ask on the wow forums? Literally no one is going to know the answer unless they work for Blizz ON this specific team…

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I’m 100% fine. I will be playing this weekend. I’m not worried about that. I’m asking an honest question: what takes so long?

The only responses so far are: “You don’t know anything about coding.” and “it’ll be up when it’s up so chill out.”

Is this forum exclusively trolls or …

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So the little door on the outside of the server, the one that you have to open to shove all the new codes and datas into, got stuck, and they called the maintenance guy to open it, but he brought the wrong tools and had to go back to the shop, and when he came back it was really late, and the codes and datas started spoiling from having to sit outside the server all day, so they had to make a new batch and here we are.

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