[james_cowling]

Yeah to be clear my point from the article is that even though you can model an incredibly high durability number in theory, there's a lot more work required to see that in practice. I'm sure the S3 team also have extremely high internal durability numbers.

A lot of other factors go into an end-to-end durability numbers, including the possibility of software bugs, correlated failure, etc. Magic Pocket has an external durability claim of 12 9s which gives us a lot of headroom between the external figure and the internal model.

Fortunately both 11 or 12 nines is close enough to infinite as far as clients are concerned.

[toomuchtodo]

Thanks for taking the time to reply James!