The WCMS project follows 3 categories of code deployment to Production Environment. Each is managed in a controlled manner, and dependent upon urgency to implement change.
Scheduled maintenance, no downtime
These are generally deployments to introduce new features, enhance existing features, or fixing bugs categorized as “Normal” or less critical.
All maintenance activities begin Wednesday morning (UTC), and typically complete within 1 hour. As soon as deployment is complete, the QA team will perform a round of sanity tests on live websites. Testing will be focused on area of change.
These deployments do not require any downtime, and has no impact to end users.
All site owners will be notified at least 1 business day in advance of the upcoming scheduled maintenance. The notification will include a description of change, and expected duration to complete deployment and test.
Scheduled maintenance, downtime
There will be some situations where the website will have to be taken offline for maintenance activities. These are expected to be infrequent, as the deployment team will take all necessary actions to deploy without taking sites offline whenever possible. However, if there are no alternatives to taking a site offline, this will be done during off-peak weekend – generally Saturday morning (UTC). During this maintenance activity, site visitors will be presented with a “Maintenance Mode” message. As soon as deployment is complete, the QA team will perform a round of sanity tests on live websites. Testing will be focused on area of change.
All site owners will be notified at least 4 business days in advance of the upcoming scheduled maintenance. The notification will include a description of change, and expected downtime duration.
Unscheduled maintenance, emergency and critical patches
There will be some situations where updates to the code will have to be completed as soon as possible due to a critical issue, such as live sites are down and unrecoverable; a critical security patch is necessary; or a security vulnerability incident.
If this maintenance activity is required, the deployment team will notify the description of change, clear identification of purpose and impact. As soon as the change is complete, the QA team will test to ensure the critical issue is resolved without negative impact to other site components.