[api]

Centralization decreases frequency of failure but increases its cost. A really large scale nasty incident with a major cloud provider like Amazon could be a national state of emergency.

[jacquesm]

It really is only a matter of time. The problem with low frequency events is that you never have any idea how realistic your modeling is and the only way you'll find out is when that once in a 1000 year event happens tomorrow morning.

[inetknght]

> once in a 1000 year event happens tomorrow morning

It doesn't quite sound like a once-in-a-thousand-year event any more.

Rather, it sounds like once-in-a-thousand-year event for a single device, but divided by ten thousand devices means it happens ten times every year.

There's whole branches of statistics for failure rates.

[jacquesm]

> It doesn't quite sound like a once-in-a-thousand-year event any more.

It still could be. Or do you expect such events to happen in year 500 only?

[Spooky23]

Perhaps... Until it happens again next week.