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toast0today at 5:13 PM0 repliesview on HN

Well, we don't know the application. Six nines is appropriate for some applications. If you're doing PSIP lookups to route 911 calls, that's reasonable. If you're sending out paper mailers, it's not.

But six nines gives you 7.9 seconds a quarter. If you run a multihost system, that translates to ~1s dead host detection and switch and 3-4 switches per quarter. It's acheivable with reliable hardware and reasonable software. Otoh, it's very hard to hit if you need to move traffic to a different location to respond to a no notice location failure (failed automatic transfer switch, all fiber paths severed by construction because the redundant paths were in the same bundle, etc). If you have an out for 'cloud provider failure', that probably covers location failures.

Often times a tight uptime promise like that also comes with maintenance windows. Depending on the application, degraded service or no service may be acceptable within the maintenance window.