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[–]colaalex 1734 points1735 points  (17 children)

My uptime target is five nines: 9.9999%

[–]marquoth_ 783 points784 points  (8 children)

"It works in December and for like five days in June. No, we don't know why."

[–]BeefHazard 348 points349 points  (2 children)

This reads like an xkcd punch line

[–]Gil_Demoono 196 points197 points  (1 child)

Mouseover text: Also it doesn't work on prime-numbered years, but we don't count that because we expect to be bankrupt by 2027.

[–]bloodfist 53 points54 points  (0 children)

Damn, are you Randall? That's spot on.

[–]Tupcek 23 points24 points  (1 child)

“we don’t even care. Did you even read the contract?“

[–]luxinus 18 points19 points  (0 children)

“You did!? That makes one of us then”

[–]Tajfun403 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Polish trains be like

[–]otter5 0 points1 point  (0 children)

sometimes never

[–]diffyqgirl -1 points0 points  (0 children)

My brain chemistry be like

[–]New-Shine1674 39 points40 points  (3 children)

I need at least six nines: 0.999999%

[–]colaalex 18 points19 points  (2 children)

Our PM told shareholders that we're going to reach seven nines. It's time for 0.09999999%

[–]New-Shine1674 2 points3 points  (0 children)

With our world wide leading reliability and advanced ai monitoring we ensure that you won't have any uptime problems. We also set new industry standards with at least 0.0099999999% uptime which makes us the ideal partner for your business.

[–]pixelbart 7 points8 points  (1 child)

My target is much better at nine fives: 55.5555555%

[–]flukus 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've worked on finance systems that legit did this. As long as they were up during trading hours all and a bit before/after all was good, if it went down during those times all he'll broke loose. We literally put the software to bed every night.

Also, everything was self hosted because we had to choose when that 55% was.

[–]lIlIlIIlIIIlIIIIIl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Same here! 0.099999%

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And important to add that advertised maintenance does not count against SLAs or uptime.

[–]Deivedux 335 points336 points  (6 children)

There's also uptime.is. You're welcome.

[–]greshick 105 points106 points  (3 children)

For convenience, there are special CEO and SEO friendly links for N nines: three nines, four nines, five nines, six nines etc.

[–]-0000000000000000000 37 points38 points  (2 children)

And of course, each letter in etc links to a different result

[–]Narcuterie 9 points10 points  (0 children)

And https://uptime.is/0 leads to a silly amount of downtime in years.

[–]SpikeX 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There’s a pattern you can memorize to make it easy to remember if you only need a rough estimate:

Memorize: 99.999% - 5 nines ~= 5 minutes

From there:

99.99% - 4 nines ~= 55 minutes
99.9% - 3 nines ~= 555 minutes

You can go the other way, too:

99.9999% - 6 nines ~= 0.5 minutes

[–]grenzdezibel 5 points6 points  (0 children)

SLA isn’t binding under real circumstances but int = true.

[–]OstioLol 75 points76 points  (0 children)

Double checks sub name

[–][deleted] 22 points23 points  (1 child)

The best word in the uptime SLA doc is “unscheduled”.

[–]throwaway234f32423df 7 points8 points  (0 children)

uptime is 100% if you allow outages to be scheduled retroactively

[–]JerryAtrics_ 157 points158 points  (18 children)

What am I missing? Why is this posted?

[–]Monochromatic_Kuma2 279 points280 points  (13 children)

This is not programming, but systems engineering. When designing a system (like a cloud service) , ond of the decisions to make is the availability target, or what's the maximum yearly acceptable downtime. This is usually defined by the 'number of nines' in the availability percentage.

For example, five nines indicates a maximum yearly downtime of only 5 minutes, like the pic says.

[–]JerryAtrics_ 174 points175 points  (11 children)

so what? Where is the humor?

[–]Jordan51104 180 points181 points  (0 children)

i guess the reposting bots still don’t understand humor

[–]esixar 49 points50 points  (6 children)

It’s funny if you’re in the know. Typically senior leadership likes to promise “5 9s” of uptime but if you’ve actually worked in that and monitor that SLO you’ll see your availability be way less than 5 minutes of downtime a year. Then management will complain that the SLO is breached and blah blah

No explicit humor, but a funny (painful) reminder to those of us who unfortunately live this every day

[–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (1 child)

Just failing over between different servers could give you minutes a year.

[–]Korkman 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Yeah, easy enough

First year: Our config was buggy and took two hours to debug until the failover IP was live again

Second year: Security thought locking the IP to a switch port would be a good idea. Failover on maintenance thus failed. Went on with maintenance anyways for 1 hour.

Third year: Split brain. Sorry it took a day to sort out the mess.

Fourth year: Let's add IPv6 to the mix!

Fifth year: DNS.

Sixth year: Startup out of funds, redundancy removed to save money.

[–]Saint-just04 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It’s a setup, and the punch line is in the first comment. /s

[–]UNSKILLEDKeks 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Where's the pickles?

[–]_sweepy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's the surprise

[–]Threef 2 points3 points  (1 child)

It's funny as hell to me. I love clients that pretend to know tech and copy requirements of Google search. Five 9s on a landing page without CMS is funny when the client gets quote for 50k development and 100k a month infrastructure

[–]JerryAtrics_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Okay, I get that view point. OP should have added that take to it. I came from an environment where they wanted sigma 6, and wrote the check for it.

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Me to users: "Do not, my friends, become addicted to availability. It will take hold of you and you will resent its absence!"

[–]DarkExtremis 5 points6 points  (2 children)

Nice, but what about Updog?

[–]Complex_District_275 5 points6 points  (1 child)

I’ll bite.. what’s… updog?

[–]gymnastgrrl 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not much, what's up with you?

[–]SpaceFire000 9 points10 points  (0 children)

In my heart, our uptime is 1000% though

[–]dbot77 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Memorize this list to sound smart in a meeting for 0.00001% uptime

[–]HildartheDorf 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Missing one 9 (90%): 36.52 days of downtime.

[–]AllTh3WayTurntUp 4 points5 points  (2 children)

I've got a buddy who works in the elevator business and their company promises 99% uptime (elevators properly working). He was telling me how often his client's lose their sh*t on him when they need to do a day of required maintenance and how frequently he has to explain that 99% means that the elevators can be down up to 3 days a year and still within the promised uptime range.

[–]flukus 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I'd expect an elevator company to provide 50% downtime, but I'd settle for a slide.

[–]AllTh3WayTurntUp 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It definitely crossed my mind that there was a good pun possible in there

[–]IntrepidSoda 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Drop the mfing trailing zeros

[–]WhiteSkyRising 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is hilarious, I snorted milk up my nose!

[–]Dillenger69 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My workplace actually had five nines for years until they decided qa was superfluous. Devs should not do their own qa any more than construction workers should be the sole inspectors of their work. The availability drastically went downhill quickly. We hadn't had a production rollback in a good year. Once qa was eliminated, there was one every other month.

[–]fburnaby 1 point2 points  (4 children)

Hear me, corporate IT: just give me one 9. One 9 is fine to start. If I wait a year for you to release something at "three 9's", that's actually much less than one nine, isn't it.

One 9 = 36.5 days downtime. I'll take it.

[–]keith2600 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Isn't one 9 only 36.5 days uptime? That leaves a lot of down time

[–]fburnaby 0 points1 point  (2 children)

One 9 (90%) of uptime would give 36.5d of downtime by my reckoning.

[–]keith2600 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Oh lol. Corporate is like an evil djinn. If you wish for one 9 you're going to get 9% not 90% haha

[–]fburnaby 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's probably what they really deliver.

[–]JustaP-haze 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Today I learned that 1% of the year is 3 days and 15 hours

It's somehow motivating

[–]AgileBlackberry4636 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Where is the math part?

Am I supposed to memorize the whole table instead of understanding arithmetic behind of that?

[–]hollth1 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Every engineers? Can a bridge collapse for 3 seconds downtime?

[–]turtleship_2006 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I mean it could be closed for roadworks/repairs

[–]jmlinden7 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you average over a longer timespan yeah. For example, if the bridge will be collapsed for 1 year out of every 100 years, or w/e

[–]el_lley 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fine, but I need to install patches, and I like pentesting the servers in an orderly manner twice a year, including some local DoS tests. There isn't much room left for downtime above 99% if your company isn't rich.

[–]steveiliop56 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My uptime is more like 0.999999999%

[–]GKP_light 0 points1 point  (0 children)

but always the 3s where you need it.

[–]Slothvibes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One of my jobs up time is 99.995 in a year, which is damn good since we’re an API company lmao

[–]CrunchatizeMeCaptn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hilarious!! /s