It can be difficult to get permission to have periodic scheduled downtime. Therefore it
was important to Tom to start such a tradition at the creation of Lumeta rather than try
to fight for it later.He sold the idea by explaining that while the company was young, the
churn and growth of the infrastructure would be extreme. Rather than annoy everyone
with constant requests for downtime, he promised to restrict all planned outages for
Wednesday evening after 5 PM. Explained that way the reaction was extremely positive.
Because he used terms such as, “while the company is young” rather than a specific time
limit, he was able to continue this Wednesday night tradition for years.
For the first few months Tom made sure there was always a reason to have downtime
on Wednesday night so that it would become part of the corporate culture. Rebooting
an important server was good enough to encourage people to go home even though
it only look a few minutes. Departments planned their schedule around Wednesday
night, knowing it was not a good time for late-night crunches or deadlines. Yet he also
established a reputation for flexibility by postponing the maintenance window at the
tiniest request. People got into the habit of spendingWednesday night with their families
Once the infrastructure was stable the need for such maintenance windows became
rare. People complained mostly when an announcement of “no maintenance this week”
came late onWednesday. Tom established a policy that any maintenance that would have
a visible outage had to be announced by Monday evening and that no announcement
meant no outage. While not required, sending an email to announce that there would be
no user-visible outage each week prevented his team from becoming invisible and kept
the notion of potential outages onWednesday nights alive in people’s minds. Formatting
these announcements differently trained people to pay attention when there really would
be an outage.