Greetings...

I want to spend a few moments with you talking about everything that happens when we do a monthly update, as well has happened in the last 24 hours.

The first thing I would like to do is define a couple of terms. The first is a hotfix, the second monthly updates.

You see hot fixes every few days. I usually try to post a “What do we have on the plate for tomorrow” post containing what’s coming up with the maintenance the next day. Hot fixes usually contain updates that are low risk and high bang for the buck. We might fix a server crash, fix a client crash, fix an exploit, or correct a big problem that we have recently solved. Once we have a set of finished code and data, we have to propagate the information to all the servers. This process takes many hours. There is a great deal of data that needs to get pushed across both sides of the country. Servers come down in the morning, and servers come up running the new version.

Monthly updates are a bit different. We start by moving all the current code, scripts, and data onto an internal QA server for testing. After a week, it moves to testcenter where it usually stays for 2 weeks. The last step in this process is moving the monthly update to live clusters.