Fostering Fearlessness: Working in the Middle of the Day Instead of the Middle of the Night

There's no shortage of articles on CI/CD and how to run a configuration validation utility before reloading or restarting a service, but this type of validation is not the same as acceptance testing. Furthermore, these validations don't always give you (or your leadership team) the confidence to allow you to make big changes to your Production Infrastructure during normal business hours, often preferring to err on the side of caution and scheduling a maintenance window when you might prefer to be in bed. Utilizing local network configurations and HAProxy, we've upgraded major versions of PHP—and even HAProxy itself—in the middle of the day with zero downtime, and with zero fear that we were going to interrupt our Production workload for over 100,000 websites. Let's explore some strategies for reclaiming your late nights/early mornings by demonstrating infrastructure reliability and real-world acceptance testing.