In response to our recent maintenance windows we got some feedback[0] about advance notice of outages. I created this chart to provide us with some internal guidelines about when we should publicize maintenance, and how to do so:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Cloud_VPS/Admin/Maintenance_notif...
You will notice that at the moment my imagination is limited to 'write to a mailing list.' I encourage people to fill in ideas on that page (or the associated talk page) about other ways we can warn people about these things. If we wind up with so many broadcast channels that it becomes impractical to actually use them all we can invest in automation.
I'm also not especially committed to the brackets on that chart; I'd like to have broad categories and low standards, but edits are welcome! One thing that I want to be more mindful about is the distinction between "things that mess with our users" (e.g. quarry or horizon downtime) vs. "things that mess with our users' users" (e.g. web proxy downtime.) I'd love it if someone with better wiki-editing skills spruced up the chart to reflect that difference.
-A
[0] for example https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T333477#8764263