The implications of downtime must be considered in a business context — otherwise this kind of discussion makes little sense. You need to set service level obje

The implications of downtime must be considered in a business context — otherwise this kind of discussion makes little sense. You need to set service level objectives (SLOs) for your business. In some businesses, your SLOs will force you to implement high-availability solutions. In other businesses, your users are not paying for high availability, and you are doing nothing wrong by using a single server, assuming you can recover from a failure in a predictable amount of time, meet your SLOs and not lose data in the process. I agree with the article author: engineers tend to go way overboard, and often nobody asks the really important question: who will pay for those tight SLOs?