System Maintenance April 27-28

[Jeremy_M]

This means from Wednesday at 11:00 pm (Est) to Thursday at 8:00 am (Est) you won't be able to do the following:

• Access your Self-Serve account 
• Activate a new account

 

Please excuse us for any inconveniences. 

[Jeremy_M]

• Access your Self-Serve account 
• Activate a new account

 

Please excuse us for any inconveniences. 

[kutzki]

I did... Actually. Thank you for saving me the trouble. Very much appreciated. Lol

[srlawren]

@kutzki did you mean to tag @David_J maybe?  In any regard, thanks for asking about it, as we are all curious what these maintenance windows entail.  

And thanks David for the great high-level overview.  We realize you probably can't share specific details for security, privacy, and/or competitive reasons.  This was very helpful regardless!  

[kutzki]

@Jeremy_M that was extremely helpful. Thanks so much. Have a great day!

[makkahn28]

Hi @David_J, how are you? For Public Mobile #7.

For Public Mobile #6 lol

[David_J]

Hi,

Just to answer questions around what happens during these maintenance windows. Our teams are night owls so they usually do the updates in the early hours of the morning to minimiz those that it affects.

Here's our three types of planned maintenance windows;

1)  Every Tuesday and Thursday we have planned maintenance – used for small configuration changes, launching new plans….etc

2) The periodic larger maintenance release and larger code releases – used for big changes, defect fixing, new codes…etc. These usually happen over the weekend evenings.

3) Provisioning releases – where usually our WSC is fully functional other than the provisioning some transactions such as activations and number changes. These also happen over weekend evenings when we're not involved with a maintenance window like what is described in (2).

The challenge is the first type, which will not always require a WSC outage. Occasionally it catches us, which is what happened earlier in April when it was not expected to cause an outage. Mea culpa. We were caught by surprise too and our apologies that we didn't give everyone the heads up on this. 

This week's maintenance window is what is termed 'hygenic infrastructure update', so more about maintenance and keeping servers and hardware up and running than adding anything.

Hope this helps 🙂

[kutzki]

@7789849803 this is true. If you had access to, and were authorized to either provide me with that information, or at least a good explanation as to why you couldn't provide me with that information, then I'd just accept that, but I don't believe you have that kind of access so I shall just wait. Thank you very much though for at least trying to help. It is appreciated. 

[7789849803]

@kutzki Again, I can think of several reasons why a company may not be able to, or may not want to, share this type of information. But I'll let you get your answers straight from the horse's mouth, since that's what you're looking for anyway.

[kutzki]

@7789849803 first off, thank you for such a prompt response. Second... Even all of the above you've just said... Would it really be so in efficient for them to provide us with that information... I mean, does the extra 2 minutes it takes to provide us with whatever information they have on what they're changing or fixing of whatever really have such an impact on the rest of the service? Can't be that difficult of a thing for them to do right? Doesn't cost extra hands or extra money or anything, it's just simply providing an explanation for the maintenance... Which I know I would be grateful for can't speak for everyone else but I'm sure others would be too. Anyways I'm hoping @Jeremy_M is able to do this, but if he isn't I'm hoping he can provide an explanation as to why so at least I'm not sitting here frustrated and disappointed as I twiddle my thumbs lol.

[7789849803]

@kutzki Here are several examples (all speculative) of things that could be involved in maintenance and still be neither bug-fixes nor involve new features:

• Changing how Telus' systems connect to the PM systems
• A change involving any Telus system (since PM uses the Telus network infrastructure it would also be affected)
• A database maintenance operation involving either data clean up or restructuring to plan for future features or bug fixes or for a system capacity increase.
• A change in a PM system that does not affect customers (such as changing credit card gateways, or fixing the interface that customer service people use to access accounts).

Again, these are just examples. The list could go on. And as I've stated several times before on the community, I'm no longer a software expert, so it's possible there's several other things that I'm not even thinking of.

[kutzki]

I agree on the speculation point.... But what types of tasks don't involve bug fixes... New features I get but what are they doing all of this maintenence for if they're not fixing issue or adding stuff to the website. It can't take up that much of their effort to do so... Lol it doesn't have to be every single one... Every other one... Or every time there's anything they've fixed that's a minor annoyance to people or a major bug fix, etc. Lol

[7789849803]

@kutzki I understand that you're wanting more information on when issues will get fixed, but I don't know if providing a change log each time there's scheduled maintenance will address that directly. I'm assuming these downtimes could be for various technical reasons as well (such as tasks that won't involve any new features nor bug fixes).

In the end, any actual information will have to come from Jeremy, and anything you and I could say at this point would be mere speculation.

[kutzki]

Hey... So when are you guys gonna start telling us what the maintenance fixes. I always see maintenance but I never know what's getting fixed so everyone just thinks the my account and website will be forever bugged. If you provided a log or something like that, or when you post that you're doing maintenance you can tell us what is supposed to be fixed I feel like a lot of people would be put at ease. Idk if it's supposed to be private but if PM really is all about feedback then shouldn't this be even more helpful? If you don't end up fixing something, somebody in the community can post about it. Idk maybe I'm wrong. Oracles.... Wanna weigh in here? Just always confused me. Not too many companies do that and I've found that you're usually the exception to that rule because you guys are dope....  But yeah. Maybe I'm wrong. Let me know. Hehe

All the best, 

Kutzki