6 ms·

As someone working on a mail service of my own, this is heartening to see. Even Google messes up sometimes.

• Waterluvian 8y ago
  Yup. And that's by design. Stability is asymptotic and increasingly expensive to reach toward 100%. There's a very intentional "this is good enough" point.
  • x3tm 8y ago
    What are the main factors that could lead to such a situation?
    • taneq 8y ago
      Well, the "good enough" point is reached when the cost of improving the reliability of the service is more than people would pay for that improved reliability.
    • gizzlon 8y ago
      From the first SRE book [1]: "The error budget stems from the observation that 100% is the wrong reliability target for basically everything (pacemakers and anti-lock brakes being notable exceptions). In general, for any software service or system, 100% is not the right reliability target because no user can tell the difference between a system being 100% available and 99.999% available. There are many other systems in the path between user and service (their laptop, their home WiFi, their ISP, the power grid…) and those systems collectively are far less than 99.999% available. Thus, the marginal difference between 99.999% and 100% gets lost in the noise of other unavailability, and the user receives no benefit from the enormous effort required to add that last 0.001% of availability. If 100% is the wrong reliability target for a system, what, then, is the right reliability target for the system? This actually isn’t a technical question at all—it’s a product question.." [1] https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/introduction/ https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/introductio... https://landing.google.com/sre/books/ https://landing.google.com/sre/books/
      • SilasX 8y ago
        Please, please stop using mono space for quotes. It’s hard to read on small screens. Just > is better.
        • codetrotter 8y ago
          It’s not hard. It’s actually impossible. I agree, just use >. If I worked for YC as a HN mod I would literally spend a bit of time every day to review as many mono space-using comments I could every day and edit them to use > instead.
          • hawaiianbrah 8y ago
            Or write a bot to do it automatically everywhere
            • lftl 8y ago
              Or fix the CSS
              • deathanatos 8y ago
                The monospace is, I think, intended for code, and a lot of us use it that way. You want something separate for code blocks and block quotes here.
          • deathanatos 8y ago
            Or give us actual syntax for blockquotes? (> at the beginning of a line, markdown style, would be great…) Which I feel like gets used all the time in the discourse here, and for good reasons, too. Then you would have that bit of time back, and the rest of us could stop scrolling back and forth when someone code-blocks a blockquote.
        • jessaustin 8y ago
          Why not use italics instead? How does the ">" help? You can put it at the beginning of the paragraph, but lines get re-flowed so you can't put it at the beginning of lines.
    • Elv13 8y ago
      Well, I would say that the complexity of complexity is exponential. In the aerospace industry, to get that last percent of a percent, 2 completely independent implementations of everything are used. Then to get another decimal, you add 2 more implementations and a consensus algorithm. Then of course you add static/unit/api/integration/stress/fuzz test suits for each implementation. Then test the tests. Then have a human run each test as the "second implementation" of the CI system. And so on, and so on. Each new decimal "9" cost multiple time more in human resource alone. Then take into account the "productivity loss" of all those process and you need yet more poeple to progress as fast. Adding more people to a project has a diminishing return. After a while you can spend the entire GDP of the world and you wont be able to add another availability decimal point.
      • whatshisface 8y ago
        >After a while you can spend the entire GDP of the world and you wont be able to add another availability decimal point. And in a couple decades, when the world GDP is a bit higher, formal methods will become practical in real-life situations.
        • oblio 8y ago
          This work needs to happen on both sides. Format methods need to become much cheaper and more accessible.
  • _red 8y ago
    Well, the value they get from being able to read your private emails is not high enough to warrant 100%....
• nabla9 8y ago
  Gmail has had almost four nines availability at least in some years and no scheduled downtime. That's still a hour of downtime per year. Generally the availability of web services for individual users seems to be between 99.5 - 99.9 depending on the service. Too high availability target wastes resources and network failures and third parties limit what actual effective availability can be.
• maxtheman 8y ago
  What service are you working on? I'd be interested in learning about it.
  • Felz 8y ago
    It's not ready for release yet (in a week or two maybe), but I'm working off the idea of a pay-per-use email service. Instead of a flat per month fee, you're charged for resources used. It looks like it'll end up being about an order of magnitude cheaper than other paid email services so far. Hopefully from there it'll be a good base to try out other improvements to email too.