[nullwasamistake]

You have to be kidding me. 14 9's is already microseconds a year. Surely below anybody's error bar for whether a service is down or not.

16 9's and aws should easily last as long as the great pyramids without a second worth of outage.

What a joke

[agwa]

The 16 9's are for durability, not availability. AWS is not saying S3 will never go down; they're saying it will rarely lose your data.

[nullwasamistake]

This number is still total bullshit. They could lose a few kb and be above that for centuries

[deanCommie]

It's not about losing a few kb here and there.

It's about losing entire data centers to massive natural disasters once in a century.

[jefftk]

None of the big cloud providers have unrecoverably lost hosted data yet, despite sorting vast volumes, so this doesn't seem BS to me.

[mentat]

AWS lost data in Australia a few years ago due to a power outage I believe.

[anbop]

on EBS, not on S3. EBS has much lower durability guarantees

[nullwasamistake]

Not losing any data yet doesn't give justification for such absurd numbers

[joshuamorton]

Those numbers probably aren't as absurd as you think. 16 9s is, I think 10 bytes lost per exabyte-year of data storage.

There's perhaps the additional asterisk of "and we haven't suffered a catastrophic event that entirely puts us out of business". (Which is maybe only terrorist attacks). Because then you're talking about losing data only when cosmic-ray bitflips happen simultaneously in data centers on different continents, which I'd expect doesn't happen too often.

[joshuamorton]

This is for data loss. 11 9s is like 1 byte lost per terabyte-year or something, which isn't an unreasonable number.

[StreamBright]

This is why I linked the SLA page which you obviously have not read. There are different numbers for durability and availability.