Is anyone doing this at a site where serious money is involved? For instance, that 4 minutes of downtime described in the article would be a loss of something like $120k at Amazon.
Looking at the opportunity cost lost by four minutes of downtime without comparing it to the increased cost of not doing continuous deployment doesn't seem like a fair comparison.
Also, with huge monolithic deployments, the risk of much longer downtime is increased. If you can get deployments into non-events, you don't have as many catastrophic problems.
