I realise also you may have been thinking of “maintenance” in the traditional sense, e.g. package & kernel upgrades, etc. This is what we have resolved:
- Whenever we have to upgrade the node (as with last release
1.19.0), we’ll do our package upgrades then… as incpin the new binary,apt update,apt upgrade,reboot. - This is least likely to cause a disruption since the core node has to face 20 to 25 seconds of unavailability from a restarting system, but often the nodes take about 30 seconds to restart anyway so it’s not proportionally significant.
Keep in mind apt upgrade or equivalent doesn’t always require rebooting the system… generally only kernel upgrades, network stack, systemd related things, or some universal library like libc. However Ubuntu kernel updates are likely to be far more frequent than new versions of cardano-node, so we have provisioned for a reboot upon every node software release as a matter of course. That will keep us far enough ahead of Ubuntu security releases in my opinion.