Hacker News Reader

Not really, just do a rolling deployment like you should be doing anyway. No one cares if the new version takes 1 millisecond to start up or 3 seconds because they literally won't notice.

View on HN

But 3 seconds isn't on the table. It is more like 20-30 seconds on a medium sized app and 8 seconds for a small one.

If your Java app takes half a minute to initialise it's the app's problem, not Java. Modern Java frameworks have moved from a dynamic deployment model to statically compiled and can start in milliseconds. (for example, see the benchmarks on https://quarkus.io/blog/runtime-performance/)

Rolling deployment is a hack imho. Adds complexity and hence yet more potential failure modes.

Hardly, it's a fantastic guardrail when combined with health checks. You can say "you don't need it", but everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Make those mistakes not matter. You also take backups, right? Same idea.

It has a non-zero cost though, which is why I don't like it. Things go wrong with the "roll" for example. You have potentially two versions of your code running against the same DB for some time.

Stop -> deploy code -> start is simpler and less likely to go wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com