3 ms·

While the web is quite complex now, I think the expectation of 100% uptime for anything is unreasonable. My local taco shop ran out of rice a few weeks ago. A

While the web is quite complex now, I think the expectation of 100% uptime for anything is unreasonable. My local taco shop ran out of rice a few weeks ago. A few days ago they had some unspecified kitchen issue and had to close. They don't open on sundays. Occasional downtime is normal. We can try to prevent it, as devs, working with machines, but it is inevitable. Nothing continues working forever. All industries have downtime, it needs to be accepted and planned for. Even in the old days, with the simplest possible thing that needs a db connection, you could outscale that db, or bandwidth, or whatever, and crash. It was easier back then in a lot of ways - 1000 people visit your new site? Crash. Before auto scaling infra you had to either deal with it or pay for too much hardware. I'm sure there are many other examples.

misnome 5y ago
> All industries have downtime, it needs to be accepted and planned for. And those that can't - e.g. those with lives at risk over failure - have very slow, conservative and burdensome processes for changes and approval, that would never be accepted without the necessary risk.
- grumple 5y ago
  Indeed, tech moves too quickly for those processes generally. Those who have great processes in tech - and I guess Github is one of those with great processes despite the occasional downtime - pay a lot for the uptime. Critical industries plan for failure. Pilots and astronauts plan for catastrophic failure (and it happens). Hospitals sometimes have fires or run out of oxygen or beds or have equipment failures and have to plan for that. Everybody assumes tech will just keep working in the SaaS world. At the end of the day though, costs of the average service having downtime (even if you calculate google makes 2 million per minute) are generally pretty low and are usually recouped after the service comes back up.
prepend 5y ago
> My local taco shop ran out of rice a few weeks ago. A few days ago they had some unspecified kitchen issue and had to close. They don't open on sundays. And mine has never run out of rice. They are closed on Sunday and Monday. I don’t monitor them enough to know how many 9’s, but I’ve probably eaten there 200 times in 9 years and never experienced an outage. Some places suck more than others. But my expectation is 100% uptime when it comes to rice at my taco shop. I think assuming competence is healthy, as long as I’m not a jerk when it happens to fail. I love my taco shop and would survive if they didn’t have an ingredient once. But they work really hard to keep everything working.

misnome 5y ago

> All industries have downtime, it needs to be accepted and planned for. And those that can't - e.g. those with lives at risk over failure - have very slow, conservative and burdensome processes for changes and approval, that would never be accepted without the necessary risk.

grumple 5y ago
Indeed, tech moves too quickly for those processes generally. Those who have great processes in tech - and I guess Github is one of those with great processes despite the occasional downtime - pay a lot for the uptime. Critical industries plan for failure. Pilots and astronauts plan for catastrophic failure (and it happens). Hospitals sometimes have fires or run out of oxygen or beds or have equipment failures and have to plan for that. Everybody assumes tech will just keep working in the SaaS world. At the end of the day though, costs of the average service having downtime (even if you calculate google makes 2 million per minute) are generally pretty low and are usually recouped after the service comes back up.

prepend 5y ago

> My local taco shop ran out of rice a few weeks ago. A few days ago they had some unspecified kitchen issue and had to close. They don't open on sundays. And mine has never run out of rice. They are closed on Sunday and Monday. I don’t monitor them enough to know how many 9’s, but I’ve probably eaten there 200 times in 9 years and never experienced an outage. Some places suck more than others. But my expectation is 100% uptime when it comes to rice at my taco shop. I think assuming competence is healthy, as long as I’m not a jerk when it happens to fail. I love my taco shop and would survive if they didn’t have an ingredient once. But they work really hard to keep everything working.