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Our demo server crashed right before a big meeting with a potential investor in the Ren Cen
We were setting up in a conference room on the 20th floor, and the whole thing just went dark... turns out our cloud provider had a zone outage. I had to pull the demo from a local backup on my laptop I keep for this exact reason, and we got it running in about 8 minutes. Has anyone else had to pivot that fast during a pitch?
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cole_flores442mo agoTop Commenter
That "live database rebuild" story is wild... but I'm stuck on the "no one even noticed" part. If you're showing live data in a demo, a rebuild would have to cause a loading screen or a blank state for a second. Maybe the investors just didn't know what they were looking at, but someone in tech would have seen a hiccup. Still, pulling that off is impressive.
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jamie_webb672mo ago
I read about a team that used a read replica for the demo interface while they rebuilt the main production database. The switch was just a DNS change that took milliseconds. In my experience, if you have a solid caching layer in front, you can mask almost any backend operation. The key is having those fallback systems ready before you even start the demo.
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