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Comment by truetraveller | Hacker News Reader

Ouch. Does B2 Cloud actually go down during this time. That's a major show-stopper. Was actually counting on B2. Not sure anymore.

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Yev from Backblaze here -> typically not - we've built most of our systems to be keep data up and flowing during those maintenance windows - if we anticipate longer windows or are doing things that can impact performance we typically announce it on our blog and twitter!

Thanks for building Backblaze. If you're able to share some feedback with the team - this is an extremely important factor. If you can ensure downtime is avoided during maintenance windows, it will make your service much more viable for production systems

Can anyone be 100% sure that downtime is avoided during maintenance windows?

If you have some umm other useful tips for that 100% uptime let the rest of the world know. I am more happy with realistic and upfront statements from B2 than some wishful thinking from potential users.

This is an unreasonable expectation. The whole point of a maintenance window is to allot an expected time when there might be downtime.

Otherwise, the maintenance window becomes 24hx365, since "ensuring downtime is avoided during maintenance window" means literally - make a maintenance window have the same uptime as non-maintenance window.

It's not necessarily unreasonable, it just depends on what kind of product they want to offer. S3, Google Storage, etc. do not have a maintenance window that I'm aware of. That's not to say they would never go down, but if they do you would expect an alert and an apology, at least. Many application require this kind of expected uptime, but of course there are others (backup, etc) that would not.

Yes the request would turn into - please remove the maintenance window, instead of "make the maintenance window not have downtime"

>if we anticipate longer windows or are doing things that can impact performance we typically announce it on our blog and twitter!

As a customer is there any way to opt-into a more proactive notification of an anticipated delay, like an email? I understand such things are necessary sometimes, but "always pay attention to some blog or twitter for a rare occurrence" doesn't seem particularly busy-stressed-admin friendly :).

RSS feed for maintenances would be nice I think.

Not often, I only remember a few times in the last couple of years. If you're just hosting backups, you're unlikely to even notice. But if you're serving live production data from B2, it can bring down your whole service, which is quite painful especially if you have a large customer base.

Same here. We're midway through a migration, and this has us re-thinking the whole move. I wonder if we had a duplicate copy of our data in the EU data center if we could do a fallback during US downtime, or if the entire 'cloud' goes down.

Replying to my own comment as I just talked to their support about this: "The maintenance window does affect all our data simultaneously. As we push the updates through one data center to another." Welp, so much for that.

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