The downtime for upgrading is annoying. We're trying to get to a point where the database migrations don't require downtime. But the deploy of 8.15 caused 40 minutes of downtime, this is not acceptable. For the post-mortem please see https://dev.gitlab.org/gitlab/organization/issues/1082

Oops, that is not a public link. I've made adjustments to our handbook to move it to GitLab.com so it can be public https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/7fc274a1...

We have a great deal of repos on our GitLab private server and even a major upgrade only results in 2 minutes or so of downtime.

What spec hardware are you running this on?

I think this user meant the downtime on GitLab.com for upgrades. Self hosted installations indeed should be fast.