In my day we just committed seppuku if our uptime dropped below three-nines. I was always pushing to get my elusive 5th on a high traffic SaaS site I was lead on for many years.
I remember sitting in a Chaos Engineering conference session in Vegas (2009 or 10) while logged into 12 servers on my moto droid via tmux because someone pushed a bad patch while I was out. I just don’t understand why I look back at that fondly.
Because you were solving a problem and you felt effective.
More simply, replace uptime with downtime.
99% uptime and 99.9% uptime seem close.
1% downtime and 0.1% downtime is clearly a 10x difference.
Why not just give hours/minutes per year/month??
I have no intuitive feeling for what 0.078% is, but if it says: “average downtime of 44 minutes per month” or “7h per year” it’s clear as day.
That still isn’t as good as just saying the hours…
I dunno. As the article says, the people that use those numbers know what they mean.
The whole point of status pages is to minimize and deflate the impact. The pleasantly-high percentages even during absolute catastrophes is an intentional design feature. The percentages are not going anywhere. The percentages will continue until reliability improves. Which it won’t.
a “large” number like 99.999% looks impressive, and 99.9999% is more impressive
Idea: if we run two servers, we could count as 199.9998% !!! /s
Also: uptime percentage must be computed as the intersection of uptime across services, not the union.
GitHub Actions: 98.31% uptime. We say something like: GitHub Actions: 12 hours affected in the last 30 days (98.31% uptime).
Normal people have no understanding of percentages or numbers, I agree saying 12 hours of downtime is more useful, but I’m also tired of trying to contextualize numbers for the numerically illiterate.
“innumerate”, same as illiterate, but for numbers. Not sure if it’s a common enough word for people to understand what you’re talking about, but still there it is
So if “innumerate” and “innumerable” are both words, there must be an “illiterable,” meaning “too many words to be expressed.”
I was looking for that word but didn’t arrive at it
