OP Here - that's great feedback! Our hope is to build confidence in both the reliability of our product _and_ the consistency of the workloads. Of course, presenting the illusion of consistency while being flaky is far worse than managing customer expectations and taking intentional downtime to, in the long run, have better uptime.

Indeed, having periodic maintenance windows expected up-front probably leads to more robust architectures overall: customers building in the failsafes they need to tolerate downtime leads to more resilience. Teams that can trust their customers in that way can, in turn, take the time they need to make the investments they need to build a better product.

Perhaps this will be the blog post we write after our next major version upgrade: expectation setting around downtime _is_ the way to very high uptime.