[nicoburns]

> Depending on the service and its users, this mandatory down-time might or might not be acceptable.

True. But if it is acceptable, then it may well be a good trade-off to make.

[Darkstryder]

I agree completely. But it is a trade-off you need to be aware of, and need to be confident it will still be true in the future.

I've had situations where a client wanted a 99.95% availability SLA for our SaaS service instead of 99.5% as we were providing at the time.

He thought it was a minor change on our side, but it required completely rethinking our architecture from the ground up.

[nicoburns]

Yeah, makes sense. Conversely, our SLA is only only 98%! (we actually have much better uptime than that and have only had about ~1 or 2 hours of downtime in the last 6 month - but we have plenty of wiggle room if we need it)