TL;DR: On Wednesday, November 1st 2023, around 09:00UTC, we'll be conducting some changes to how MSE deployments are made. As a result, you may experience intermittent disruptions to the site.

How things currently work:

Currently our deployments to MSE involve a full rebuild of the entire application. That is a time consuming process and is a factor in how fast we can get changes to our live sites.

Why that's a problem that needs fixing:

As it takes a while to build the software before deploying, it increases the mean-time-to-repair and mean-time-to-recovery in case of issues on our sites — meaning that if an issue occurs, it takes longer to fix.

How we're fixing that:

Instead of rebuilding, we will be using a deployment package that has been produced earlier in our delivery pipeline. This package has already gone through all the testing steps and by the time it gets to the deployment stage to MSE, it's been proven to be good.

Using this deployment package means that we reduce the time it takes to deploy changes to MSE.

When is this happening, and why that may cause disruptions to the service:

Wednesday, November 1st 2023, between 09:00 UTC and 10:00 UTC (EDT and PDT times here).

Despite our testing, we may have missed some obscure configuration setting that prevents the site from becoming available. In case the new approach does not work, we will revert to the current situation.