I am honestly kinda curious how exactly you manage your servers and keep them up to date, I feel like there is a linux patch every week or so, which would usually require a reboot. Do you all deploy live patching, how you become aware of critical stuff in your otherwise busy lives, RSS?
One way this problem can be solved is by having multiple servers with one being the production server. The other server is usually the failover backup, but when it’s time to upgrade the other server can go down for work. Then when it’s ready you use a load balancer to send all requests to the new server. That switchover happens instantaneously: one millisecond requests are being handled by the old server then the next millisecond they’re going to the new server.
It’s kind of like teleporting a new car into place as a way of avoiding a pit stop in a race. Terrible analogy but there you go.
How do you handle the database schema changes during updates? Have two databases and disable replication during the update? How do you sync changes that occur to the backup while/after the main is upgraded?
An LTS distro like Debian and Ubuntu doesn’t update too frequently. I’ve never tried livepatching. I install updates on the weekends and reboot only if necessary. Downtime is usually about a minute and my uptime monitors don’t usually catch it.
