I’ve touched on this before referring to erlang’s hot deploy functionality. In that case I was concerned with the notion that transactions would not be reproducible during a hotplug scenario. That elements of the transaction could be mismatched as the various code segments were deployed.

This evening I read a headline that some developer had implemented hot deploy for NodeJS.  Let’s forget that NodeJS not currently a serious production environment and while it powers CoffeeScript and Less; I personally am not thrilled with the prospect of having to install NodeJS.

But now there is hot plug NodeJS.

I certainly get what the developer was going for but the reality is that in a production environment we, devops, are supposed to plan for this sort of thing. Our systems are supposed to have downtime.  We are supposed to reboot our systems every once in a while to make sure that we can. Every data center I have ever worked with or for has had a power outage at some point. Even the mighty Amazon AWS/EC2 has had major failures and outages.

So while a hotplugged NodeJS might be interesting or novel; on some levels it’s not a real feature to bet your enterprise on.