• ByteJunk@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        When contracting a service, usually there are clauses that specify that it needs to be fully working and available x% of time, and compensation may be due in case this goal isn’t met.

        Let’s say GitHub was down for 1 full day in the last year, that’s 99.7% availability. That’s “2 nines”, but sometimes people might say “2 nines five”, meaning “better than 99.5% uptime”.

        I’d say that the expectation for a high availability service nowadays is “5 nines”: 99.999% uptime. That’s around 5 minutes of downtime in a full year. This kind of performance from a site like GitHub is just unacceptable…

        • dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          Sometimes the humorous term “nine fives” (55.5555555%) is used to contrast with “five nines” (99.999%),[18][19][20] though this is not an actual goal….

          Maybe Microsoft misunderstood the assignment, and thought this was a goal. At their current rate, it’s certainly more achievable than the more traditional “five nines”.

          As an aside, I love how the following is preferences as “casual”, and then the author starts arguing semantics:

          Similarly, percentages ending in a 5 have conventional names, traditionally the number of nines, then “five”, so 99.95% is “three nines five”, abbreviated 3N5.[13][14] This is casually referred to as “three and a half nines”,[15] but this is incorrect….