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> But websites need to be up 24/7, cron jobs need to run on the weekend and backend servers need to be up to support both Tech entrepreneurs should give more w

by bckr 2y ago

> But websites need to be up 24/7, cron jobs need to run on the weekend and backend servers need to be up to support both Tech entrepreneurs should give more weight to choosing markets that don’t require this

vineyardmike 2y ago
It used to be somewhat common for websites/services to go down for a few minutes every so often for maintenance/migrations/etc. Tech entrepreneurs should give no weight to this. The market seems to support engineers doing on-call rotations, and a service that can’t tolerate any downtime is (theoretically) a service that is worth a lot to a lot of people- which is perfect for monetizing. Tech entrepreneurs should stop giving excessive “nines” of availability. Even 99% is probably enough for most customers to never notice, and significantly easier to engineer than 99.999….
- portaouflop 2y ago
  The issue is less giving out excessive SLAs - it’s more that even a tiny ass startup thinks they need high availability and four nines and scale to billions - when in reality almost no one actually needs it. But those are cool engineering problem so we’d rather work on them than on building a business.
- bckr 2y ago
  > and a service that can’t tolerate any downtime is (theoretically) a service that is worth a lot to a lot of people- which is perfect for monetizing. The connection makes sense but one must not think in this order. One must think “people will pay for this” and then consider “does this need to be highly available?” If you have more than one road to choose from, and one of them doesn’t require high availability, then give that one some bonus points for that.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  It's still common. Nobody really cares if a site is offline for a few minutes. You try again later (or not, but so what). Heck, nobody cares if they are offline for half the day, it gets fixed and at the end of it it's just a post-mortem for the nerds to read and a shrug and life goes on for everyone else. People vastly overestimate the importance of anything that is on the public internet. None of it is life-critical (if it is, it certainly should not depend on an internet connection or a web server being up).
  - coffeefirst 2y ago
    Correct. Things are breaking all the time. If you’re not a hospital or air traffic control, nobody is going to die if your website goes down. There’s a time and a place for heroics, but we go to it for shit that doesn’t really matter, or worse, allow the culture of heroics to cover up the real problems that are much harder to fix.
    - erik_seaberg 2y ago
      Imagine Walmart telling all their customers "Come back tomorrow, maybe, we can't manage to keep any of our stores open. At least nobody is going to die."
      - vineyardmike 2y ago
        Is this sarcasm? Most stores close every night.
matsemann 2y ago
An internal service we relied on when working at Norway's biggest government agency had opening hours. If you called it outside 8-17 it wouldn't reply, heh.
- bckr 2y ago
  Government is a good one. Healthcare is another. Anything geography-locked. I’m not saying no one should create a highly available web service. I am saying that this is one of those things that techies assume, and shouldn’t, because it’s a huge plus to hiring, business and engineering simplification, and morale if you can define away non-business-hour problems.
kqr 2y ago
I agree it's worth considering, but allowing problems on e.g. weekends sets up weird incentives for management everywhere I've been. For example, they may not want to fix quality issues as long as their consequences can be pushed to the weekend. Or they may start to demand people work weekends to do maintenance. Or -- worst of all -- they realise they can avoid deployments entirely on weekdays, and then do these big bang deployments on weekends. This makes engineer's lives miserable but looks like rational optimisation to management.

by bckr 2y ago

vineyardmike 2y ago

It used to be somewhat common for websites/services to go down for a few minutes every so often for maintenance/migrations/etc. Tech entrepreneurs should give no weight to this. The market seems to support engineers doing on-call rotations, and a service that can’t tolerate any downtime is (theoretically) a service that is worth a lot to a lot of people- which is perfect for monetizing. Tech entrepreneurs should stop giving excessive “nines” of availability. Even 99% is probably enough for most customers to never notice, and significantly easier to engineer than 99.999….

portaouflop 2y ago
The issue is less giving out excessive SLAs - it’s more that even a tiny ass startup thinks they need high availability and four nines and scale to billions - when in reality almost no one actually needs it. But those are cool engineering problem so we’d rather work on them than on building a business.
bckr 2y ago
> and a service that can’t tolerate any downtime is (theoretically) a service that is worth a lot to a lot of people- which is perfect for monetizing. The connection makes sense but one must not think in this order. One must think “people will pay for this” and then consider “does this need to be highly available?” If you have more than one road to choose from, and one of them doesn’t require high availability, then give that one some bonus points for that.
SoftTalker 2y ago
It's still common. Nobody really cares if a site is offline for a few minutes. You try again later (or not, but so what). Heck, nobody cares if they are offline for half the day, it gets fixed and at the end of it it's just a post-mortem for the nerds to read and a shrug and life goes on for everyone else. People vastly overestimate the importance of anything that is on the public internet. None of it is life-critical (if it is, it certainly should not depend on an internet connection or a web server being up).
- coffeefirst 2y ago
  Correct. Things are breaking all the time. If you’re not a hospital or air traffic control, nobody is going to die if your website goes down. There’s a time and a place for heroics, but we go to it for shit that doesn’t really matter, or worse, allow the culture of heroics to cover up the real problems that are much harder to fix.
  - erik_seaberg 2y ago
    Imagine Walmart telling all their customers "Come back tomorrow, maybe, we can't manage to keep any of our stores open. At least nobody is going to die."
    - vineyardmike 2y ago
      Is this sarcasm? Most stores close every night.

matsemann 2y ago

An internal service we relied on when working at Norway's biggest government agency had opening hours. If you called it outside 8-17 it wouldn't reply, heh.

bckr 2y ago
Government is a good one. Healthcare is another. Anything geography-locked. I’m not saying no one should create a highly available web service. I am saying that this is one of those things that techies assume, and shouldn’t, because it’s a huge plus to hiring, business and engineering simplification, and morale if you can define away non-business-hour problems.

kqr 2y ago

I agree it's worth considering, but allowing problems on e.g. weekends sets up weird incentives for management everywhere I've been. For example, they may not want to fix quality issues as long as their consequences can be pushed to the weekend. Or they may start to demand people work weekends to do maintenance. Or -- worst of all -- they realise they can avoid deployments entirely on weekdays, and then do these big bang deployments on weekends. This makes engineer's lives miserable but looks like rational optimisation to management.