Jean-François, our “Tech Lead” answers some of our questions in order to distinguish the different types of maintenance Funio can perform.
What do we mean with the word “maintenance”?
A maintenance is our last resort when we need to intervene on services, either to improve or re-establish them. There are two types of maintenances: the planned ones and those we will call urgent.
A planned maintenance can be a software or hardware update, or adding new functionalities to our systems.
An urgent maintenance (and unplanned!) is usually triggered after several problems have had an impact on our customers, and that now requires our immediate attention.
How do you determine when a maintenance will occur?
When I don’t have a choice! On one end, my role is to ensure that services are available at all times, and on the other, I need to update or repair our infrastructures. When these two missions don’t concord, we’ll usually call that a maintenance! I will decide to conduct a maintenance only as a last resort.
How do you plan a maintenance?
It depends on what is required to be done that will drive how we plan a maintenance. Obviously, we perform our interventions within timeframes where we know there is less server activity in order to reduce customer impact, but it is sometimes impossible to dissociate maintenance from service interruption.
Customer impact! How do you keep customers informed?
Through our blog. We always publish notices on our blog that include the time of the intervention, its impact and any other detail we think is pertinent to transmit. We regularly update these posts in real time during the period of time we perform the maintenance.
When maintenances are planned, we send out personalized notification emails to customers affected by the server maintenance, at least 24 hours before the start of our interventions. Customers affected by the maintenance can also opt to receive an end of maintenance notification by email, by selecting the form located in the interventions menu of the Customer Hub.
Closing statement?
I love my job, and I really enjoy doing maintenances, regardless of what is at stake. What we don’t like is any negative impact on our customers, which we sometimes have to cause ourselves.
That’s why we try to provide our customers the maximum amount of information on what we are doing, whether preemptive or “live”, in order for them to be in a position to inform their own customers when necessary.
I highly recommend the status section of our blog to customers who wish to stay informed on server maintenances. Here is a direct link to the page:
- http://statut.funio.com -> Français
- http://status.funio.com -> English
- http://estado.funio.com -> Español
