How to Ditch Scheduled Maintenance

Doug Barth, a PagerDuty operations engineer, advocates for eliminating scheduled maintenance to enhance system reliability and operational efficiency. Speaking at DevOps Days Chicago, Barth argues that scheduled maintenance, often occurring late at night or on weekends, is inconvenient for operations staff and limits customer access. He proposes fast, iterative maintenance strategies that avoid system-wide disruptions. Key tactics include deploying in stages with robust, script-based processes, utilizing canary deployments to safely test changes on small system segments, and implementing retries and distribution strategies to ensure system resilience. These approaches, Barth suggests, allow for maintenance during regular hours without compromising service quality, ultimately improving the work-life balance of operations teams and maintaining continuous customer access.