Historically we have always scheduled upgrades for the NC State GitHub service for Friday afternoons at 5:00 PM. This time slot was chosen for a few reasons. We chose Friday so that if something terrible happened during the upgrade, then the outage would be during non-business hours even if it took a while to resolve. The 5:00 PM time was chosen as the end of the business day, and soon after our daily backup runs, so that in the event we had to revert to a backup for whatever reason, we would be losing the least amount of data possible.
With the Microsoft acquisition, a lot of change happened involving the license model for GitHub Enterprise, and in the process of double checking all of our processes and policies against the updated license model we noticed that we do not have guaranteed support during the weekends. In looking back on our original license agreements, we actually never had guaranteed support over the weekend; however, GitHub graciously did assist us a few times during the weekend when things went south. Our current support contract gives us guaranteed support Monday – Friday, 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM Pacific Time. Premium support is available, but effectively doubles the cost of our license, and is not a feasible option for the university. Rather than continuing to rely on the benevolence of GitHub support going above and beyond what we are entitled to, we are modifying our upgrade schedule to avoid outages from upgrades rolling through the weekend.
Therefore, we will now be scheduling all GitHub upgrades for Monday at 5:00 PM.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding this change, please contact the NC State GitHub Service Team at github@help.ncsu.edu.