launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Robert Collins <robert.collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 9:07 AM, Francis J. Lacoste
<francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I like the idea of a fixed downtime budget a lot.
>
> What do we need to make it happen?
>
> My thoughts:
>
>  * A feedback mechanism allowing us to track how much of the budget is spent.
>    * Something like a script that extracts a measure from the staging update?
>  * Once the budget is spent, no more DB changes.
>  * We probably need a way to input the budget for case where a OS maintenance
>    task will shrink the DB budget.

Those things may help automate the process but I think all we actually need is:
 * Choose a budget.
 * Change the release managers documentation to remove 'determine the
downtime window' stuff and instead be 'announce how much of the budget
will be used'.

We only need these two things as long as we have some constraints:
 - the LOSA OS maintenance windows are < the downtime budget and we
know a cycle in advance for them.
 - there is a chokepoint for DB patches where someone can assess how
we're going when patches are considered.

And we already have those constraints.

-Rob