The hot take that's dividing my team: do we patch on Friday or not?

I'm the one on my team who prefers patching on Friday afternoons. Everyone else keeps saying it's a bad idea because if something breaks you're stuck dealing with it over the weekend. But in my experience over the last 3 years, waiting until Monday just means you're rushing through 20 patches with less testing time. Plus our monitoring team is actually more available on weekends because there's fewer alerts. I saw a post last week about someone's Friday patch taking down their entire ERP system at 4:30 PM and that's the exact nightmare they warned about. But I've also seen Monday patches get rolled back because the change window was too short. Am I wrong for thinking Friday patches are worth the risk if you have proper rollback plans and 2 hour runbooks ready?

2 comments

2 Comments

carter.jennifer1d ago

Friday afternoon patches work fine if you've got the runbooks tight and the rollback plan tested that morning. The key is making sure your on-call people actually know the runback and aren't scrambling to read it for the first time at 5pm. I've seen teams kill Friday deploys because they treated the runbook like a suggestion instead of a checklist, and that's where the horror stories come from. If you've got a two hour rollback window and the team has done the same patch twice before, Friday is usually a safer bet than Monday chaos with a tight change window.

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avery_walker3022h agoMost Upvoted

Isn't that like trusting a toddler with a checklist and hoping they follow it?