3 ms·

In my industry, five nines is the starting level. You're proposing something 1,000 times worse.

sumtechguy 5y ago
If you have to have 5 9's starting with any cloud service is pretty tough sell at this point. You can build that type of system ontop of them. But it takes a willingness to also build your own and use competing services adding even more complexity. The BYO or competing services bit is so you can keep the lights on even when the cloud eats it, not if. Part of 5 9's is planning for catastrophic failure. Things like 'what if the load balancer/router/backhaul/dns burns out, you have a spare on hand? Then what happens to services where you had them sticky?' Even then what if both the primary and secondary are out? What then? Lots of planning and making sure you know what to do when each of those cases happen. The nice bit though is many services can go down. Yeah it stings a bit (money, reputation, time, etc). But overall it is not that big of deal. But for the places where you can not go down. Tons of planning and tons of backup plans with backup plans, and a different style of producing code.
Edman274 5y ago
Besides the fact that they used "99 percent" in a colloquial, informal way ... is that really how calculations like that work, or should work? I mean, if you have 99 percent availability, and 99.999 percent availability, maybe it's valid to say that the former is 1000 times worse than the other, but that could also be true by saying that 99.999 percent availability is 10,000 times worse than 99.9999999 percent availability (where a service only goes down for a third of a second in the span of a decade), and that 99.9999999 percent availability is infinity times worse than something that hasn't had an outage within whatever monitored period (since 100 percent availability is the same as ninety nine dot nine repeating availability)
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Then AWS isn't really targeting you as a customer though. Most of the web really isn't that critical and can survive a few hours outage occasionally.
- greedo 5y ago
  But for those who bought into AWS as a way of improving their performance and stability, "a few hours outage occasionally" can be very expensive. If my company experienced a multi-hour outage "occasionally,", it would be $100K/hour in lost revenue. Your remark reminds me of people who say "Well, Tesla really doesn't mean `autopilot` in the way you think."

If you have to have 5 9's starting with any cloud service is pretty tough sell at this point. You can build that type of system ontop of them. But it takes a willingness to also build your own and use competing services adding even more complexity. The BYO or competing services bit is so you can keep the lights on even when the cloud eats it, not if. Part of 5 9's is planning for catastrophic failure. Things like 'what if the load balancer/router/backhaul/dns burns out, you have a spare on hand? Then what happens to services where you had them sticky?' Even then what if both the primary and secondary are out? What then? Lots of planning and making sure you know what to do when each of those cases happen. The nice bit though is many services can go down. Yeah it stings a bit (money, reputation, time, etc). But overall it is not that big of deal. But for the places where you can not go down. Tons of planning and tons of backup plans with backup plans, and a different style of producing code.

Edman274 5y ago

Besides the fact that they used "99 percent" in a colloquial, informal way ... is that really how calculations like that work, or should work? I mean, if you have 99 percent availability, and 99.999 percent availability, maybe it's valid to say that the former is 1000 times worse than the other, but that could also be true by saying that 99.999 percent availability is 10,000 times worse than 99.9999999 percent availability (where a service only goes down for a third of a second in the span of a decade), and that 99.9999999 percent availability is infinity times worse than something that hasn't had an outage within whatever monitored period (since 100 percent availability is the same as ninety nine dot nine repeating availability)

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Then AWS isn't really targeting you as a customer though. Most of the web really isn't that critical and can survive a few hours outage occasionally.

greedo 5y ago
But for those who bought into AWS as a way of improving their performance and stability, "a few hours outage occasionally" can be very expensive. If my company experienced a multi-hour outage "occasionally,", it would be $100K/hour in lost revenue. Your remark reminds me of people who say "Well, Tesla really doesn't mean `autopilot` in the way you think."