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While I accept of course that there are government-owned systems that have uptime measured in years (decades?), I think that extrapolating that into an argument

by aynsof 6y ago

While I accept of course that there are government-owned systems that have uptime measured in years (decades?), I think that extrapolating that into an argument about the overall reliability of those systems falls into survivorship bias. But if I had to make an a priori prediction about which systems would have the better reliability over the long term - cloud-based or those run out of a corporate DC - my money would be on the cloud-based systems. The cloud providers are going to have better management of power/network/hardware than the most mature government agency, simply because it's a core capability for them.

grey-area 6y ago
Change is a leading cause of outages. The cloud providers are constantly changing and upgrading their services, and constantly have downtime ranging from minutes to hours. In contrast UK gov servers like hmrc.gov.uk (for example) are pretty stable, I can't remember the last time I heard about an outage. Cloud providers are certainly better at some things (like staying up to date with latest tech), but I'd contend reliability is not one of those things based on their prominent and frequent outages (at least several a year).