Imagine that your system requires five minutes of downtime on every release. You expect your system to have a five-year life span with monthly releases. (Most companies would like to do more releases per year, but I’m being very conservative.) You can compute the expected cost of downtime, discounted by the time-value of money. It’s probably on the order of $1,000,000 (300 minutes of downtime at a very modest cost of $3,000 per minute). Now suppose you could invest $50,000 to create a build pipeline and deployment process that avoids downtime during releases. That will, at a minimum, avoid the
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