Product Availability for Releases and New Features
Expert Uptime: Our objective is to maintain 100% uptime, but we recognize that no cloud-delivered software has been able to deliver this yet. Fortunately, our efforts towards this goal have yielded benefits for you and your customers. We do not have regularly scheduled maintenance windows, even on weekends or holidays.
Our system status and uptime is publicly available. Expert customers receive quarterly reports of our platform uptime over the previous quarter and six months.
Weekly Releases
Expert deploys weekly updates and Release Notes to follow the SaaS infrastructure philosophy of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).
Created by big tech companies to provide the best service, CI/CD allows frequent system improvements while limiting overall risk. Traditional large monthly or quarterly releases can cause complex issues that take days to resolve due to the quantity of changes made at the same time. With CI/CD, although there is more frequent opportunity for issues, they are smaller in scope and more quickly resolved with less negative impact. Our strategy is shared by companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix.
Weekly releases contain bug fixes or enhancements to existing features and automatically deploy to all Expert sites. Occasionally, we skip a release due to holidays or when testing does not meet our high standards. Even more rarely, we may revert a weekly release if needed.
New Feature Launches
Deployed through the same method as weekly releases, new features do not automatically deploy to all Expert sites.
Variations include:
- Only available in the latest version of Expert
- Gradual roll-outs to allow us to monitor performance or provide additional resources to assist with adoption
- Configurable features that require Expert Professional Services or additional license costs
- Other prerequisites detailed within product announcements
Product launches are accompanied by various customer communications, including but not limited to the Expert Blog, email announcements, social media outlets, and Customer Success Managers.
Deployment Process
Through significant investment in infrastructure, the Expert deployment process avoids downtime for both weekly releases and new feature launches.
Expert follows a Blue-Green Deployment process that:
- Runs two identical production environments so that only one of the environments is live at any time
- Serves all production traffic on the live environment while software updates and testing happen in the environment that is not live
- Switches the router to serve production traffic on the updated environment only after updates are fully deployed and tested
Blue-Green Deployment also reduces risk because if unexpected issues occur in the updated environment, we can immediately switch back the previous version.