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They're still taking downtime for this... Even if they're forced to have a no-VIP no-HA no-LB setup (seems insane to me) it should be much simpler to set the DNS TTL to a low value right before and switch it to the new IP after the new box comes up.

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Yes, this is a wonderful technical hack, but terrible as a business strategy. They are admitting that they don't have a good architecture that would make upgrades easy.

That assumes they have control over the DNS. Sounds like they don't with many end customers.

They shouldn't be giving their customers a static IP, they should be giving them a 'customername.ourplatform.com' address that the customer can point a CNAME at.

This was addressed in the article: There is a tendency within that industry of whitelisting API access etc. by source IP, so their customers do need static IPs not primarily for inbound traffic, but to be able to access the APIs they need.

Now it's still stupid of them to not abstract that away from the individual customer servers but, but this issue isn't solved with cname's.

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