Do you perform routine ServiceNow releases during business hours or out of hours?

[ho_dannyblack]

Hi all,

I'm interested to understand what other customers are doing regarding the timing of their routine ServiceNow production releases.

Our organisation has historically carried out all production releases and patching activities outside of business hours, typically from 18:00 onwards. This approach was established many years ago to minimise user impact and because the platform and our support model were very different at the time.

Given the improvements in the ServiceNow platform, including the modern multi-node architecture and RaptorDB, I'm questioning whether routine application releases still need to happen out of hours.

For us, moving regular fortnightly releases into business hours could provide several benefits:

• Full availability of developers and support teams immediately after deployment.
• Faster investigation and resolution if issues occur.
• Reduced reliance on evening working and on-call arrangements.
• Better collaboration with the business for validation and testing.
• Major platform/family upgrades would still remain out of hours.

I'm particularly interested to hear:

• Do you perform routine application releases during business hours or out of hours?
• Has your approach changed over the years?
• Have you experienced any user impact from in-hours releases?
• Did your business have concerns, and how were they addressed?
• Are there any lessons learned or best practices you would recommend?

I'm considering proposing a small pilot of in-hours releases and would be interested to hear how other organisations are approaching this.

Thanks in advance for any insights.

[Tanushree Maiti]

Hi @ho_dannyblack 

• Do you perform routine application releases during business hours or out of hours? A: During business Off hours
• Has your approach changed over the years? A: No , Always any release/change takes place in business off hour (Release, patching  on Weekend)
• Have you experienced any user impact from in-hours releases? A: N/A
• Did your business have concerns, and how were they addressed?
• Are there any lessons learned or best practices you would recommend?

        Major platform upgrades, extensive structural database changes, or applications with significant user impact - must be performed in Business off hours in planned time like weekend  - as it  Minimizes business disruption and allows technical teams to safely execute complex rollbacks if unforeseen errors occur.

Routine bug fixes, minor enhancements, and configuration updates - you can do in business hour (though we generally avoid it  ) - as  Developers and system administrators are on-site to immediately address issues, reducing "mean time to repair" rather than waiting for off-hours support.

[Tony K]

I would agree that patches and upgrades are done on weekends and outside normal business hours. As for development work, features, fixes, that's more up to the company to decide. I would say your decisions should be based on what your company is comfortable with. It's not really a platform feature call like RaptorDB, multi node etc. decision.

Do you want to batch everything up and wait till after hours? There are pro's and con's to both. Other staff will be around for support during normal hours and could verify changes. Also depends on the scale of the change. A new catalog item or an entire change of how a process works. 

With automation, devops, ATF, better testing, you can move faster. Why queue up a week's worth of changes, you can deploy faster and get those features launched so users can take advantage of them. Might also make troubleshooting easier too. 

No right or wrong answer in my opinion.