Caching while the whole back end is in maintenance mode

[David Miller]

We have periodic code updates on our drupal based back end.
The back-end servers have a maintenance mode that will return a 503 for
HTTP requests without cookies.

The code updates sometimes take several hours - enough for the cached copy
to expire.  Grace mode appears (sorry; single data point; this is what the
developers told me) to time out after an hour no matter what we set it to
in vcl_recv/vcl_fetch.

Is there a better approach to have everything that's cacheable available
for a few hours?  What are others doing?

TIA,

--- David
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