Zero Downtime and Chart Gorillas

You may have noticed (or more likely no longer notice) that Chartio has had less and less downtime for deploys.  It’s not that we’re not doing releases - we’re doing more than ever - but we’ve slowly been reducing the reasons for needing any downtime in the deploy.  Just last month we finished one of the larger bottlenecks and anticipate from now on very few reasons, if any, for needing downtime during deployments.

Since that time we’ve deployed 44 times, rolled back a feature 3 times, and had a total of 0 seconds of downtime.  

We’ve gone from about 99.9% uptime (5 minutes downtime per week) to 100/99.99% uptime on an average week. So you’re now getting both less downtime, and more frequent updates!

I imagine most people will be quite happy with this, though we’ve heard that some had gotten quite accustomed to our typical 5 minute Thursday night downtime.  We heard from one team disappointed that it was a nice alarm that would prompt a weekly team coffee break.

Others were bummed that they would have less chances to play Chart Gorillas.  For those who don’t know Chart Gorillas is a game that former Chartio engineer Paul Harper made during a hackathon, that is accessible to play whenever Chartio is unavailable.  The theory was that if for whatever reason you’re unable to build charts, the next best thing to do with your time is play with charts.

In honor of no longer needing downtime for deploys, we’ve pulled the game out of our downtime page and we are now hosting it on its own domain: chartgorillas.com.  Enjoy!