Seriously, how big can that db be, and how bad would a 1hr reduced availability / downtime be?
Seems like a lot of wasted engineering effort. “You are not google”
It sounds like across multiple timezones, with a tech stack that backs the business in a specific way, that downtime could be a problem and that it would reduce their offering, "seamless" and reliability for moving.
If twitter goes down and you can't tweet, only really Twitter loses money and you can try again later. But if you're moving into an apartment you don't want to be standing outside trying to get the keys but the system is down. Edit: And you also don't want the service to tell you that you can't move in from 11am-1pm because of 'maintenance'
What kills you is when you take an hour scheduled downtime, communicate this out, get everyone on board... and then are down for a day. If you don't have a good, well-rehearsed, plan, you might be unexpectedly screwed even then. As a rule of thumb... something usually doesn't quite go how you expect it to!
You can have the best plan in the world, well rehearsed and battle tested; something in that last patch bugged out and took the system with it. Now you're getting cursed out because the email, ivr, etc all said 1 hour downtime and it's been 4.
Weekly scheduled downtime has value, but it's not a good idea for most.
My guess the conversation was 'To be agile, we need to be 100% CICD'. Next thing you know everything needs to get pushed straight to prod continuously with no downtime.