Your question provoked an interesting thought process when I began to answer it.
I had first thought that one of my projects was zero-maintenance as I truly gave it zero-maintenance in the three years between when I built it, and when I sold it. It was a website which indexed content from others. I had coded the "spider" in such a way that it was quite flexible if the content on the page changed a bit and it stood me well for those three years. I had a database back up system in place that backed up to another server.
But then I began to realise that although I had gave the site zero-maintenance, it wasn't truly zero maintenance. If I'd had a hardware failure, I'd have a backup of the database but no way to automatically spin up a new server and put it in place. But even if I had some monitoring in place for that, what if the monitoring service went down? I guess what I'm getting it as that there can never be a zero-maintenance self-sufficient service - just one that is incredibly well automated by great engineers.
I had first thought that one of my projects was zero-maintenance as I truly gave it zero-maintenance in the three years between when I built it, and when I sold it. It was a website which indexed content from others. I had coded the "spider" in such a way that it was quite flexible if the content on the page changed a bit and it stood me well for those three years. I had a database back up system in place that backed up to another server.
But then I began to realise that although I had gave the site zero-maintenance, it wasn't truly zero maintenance. If I'd had a hardware failure, I'd have a backup of the database but no way to automatically spin up a new server and put it in place. But even if I had some monitoring in place for that, what if the monitoring service went down? I guess what I'm getting it as that there can never be a zero-maintenance self-sufficient service - just one that is incredibly well automated by great engineers.