• ByteJunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      27·
      12 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.worldEnglish
        41·
        13 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….