Comment on A solar powered website that goes offline when there's no power
Stupidmanager@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Companies claiming 99.9999 uptime is an absurd goal for a SLA, and wouldn’t even survive a small internet outage like a DDoS attack or Akamai outage. I remember in the 90s selling the idea of 5 9’s - 99.999% on my resume until some manager who Interviewed me asked me to state the expected downtime. I stopped claiming that number because it’s impossible without full active redundancy in different locations and not dependent on external providers like cloudflare ever going down.
And please don’t argue maintenance windows “cover it” because that’s not how they work in the real world today.
Downtime per year:
For my home lab I’m happy my stuff is online and content I hardly lose access when there’s a power outage thanks to my ups. But if I tracked I’d be closer to 95%. Good enough but I can’t wait till I just don’t care to run anything.
Also, any non-trivial system has failure modes that are not binary. Like, if your convertible car has the roof stuck down you can drive it, but you will be sad if it rains. So, is the car “up” or not? Similarly, if your site has writes offline for a database upgrade, but reads work fine, is it “up”?
The concept is just advertising and something that makes sense to senior management, but provides no actual useful metrics.
TIEPilot@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I worked for a “99.999%” up time facility. No one talks about the exceptions that don’t effect that number. Some are out of our hands like weather or a knob w/ a backhoe.
Others are just made up by upper management to hit the numbers for their bonuses.