Enterprise loves to brag about zero-downtime.
Blue/green deploys, rolling updates, canary releases.
Most of us are just trying not to nuke the family photo gallery during a rebuild.
But even in a small stack, you can design for continuity.
Start With Service Boundaries
Don’t run everything in one container:
- Split frontends, backends, and databases
- Use reverse proxies as stable entry points
- Decouple so updates hit only one piece at a time
Separation makes disruption local, not global.
Blue/Green Without the Buzzwords
You don’t need Kubernetes for this:
- Keep two directories or containers: current and next
- Deploy to next, test in isolation
- Flip the proxy to next only when it’s ready
- Keep current around for fast rollback
Simple toggles beat clever pipelines.
Stagger Updates
Rolling updates are just common sense:
- Update one service at a time
- Confirm health before moving on
- Automate checks where possible (HTTP 200, database migrations)
Don’t shotgun the whole stack.
Manage State Carefully
Stateless services are easy. Databases aren’t:
- Schema migrations should be backwards-compatible where possible
- Test restores from snapshots before applying changes
- Accept that DB downtime may still be unavoidable — but plan to minimise it
Most outages come from data, not code.
Automate Recovery Paths
Mistakes happen:
- Keep rollback scripts ready
- Backups integrated into deploy flow, not afterthoughts
- Monitor new deployments aggressively for regressions
A failed deploy is fine. A failed rollback isn’t.
Why It Matters
Zero-downtime isn’t about enterprise bragging rights.
It’s about keeping your services useful while you improve them.
Small stacks need resilience just as much as big ones — maybe more, because you don’t have a team to fix it at 3 a.m.
Design for continuity, not heroics.