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by itisit 1607 days ago
> Is downtime an actual, business-killing problem in practice?

Yes, if the business is an enterprise, unscheduled downtime can result in significant losses. It's why disaster recovery is a serious business.

2 comments

Of course, there are businesses where uptime is absolutely critical, though I'd argue a lot of those already operate their own hardware for that reason (and would benefit little from moving to the cloud) or already have a cloud-based, distributed (multi AZs or multi-cloud even) system in place.

But is this actually the case of most companies? The AWS outages always have major ripple effects across the internet, suggesting that a lot of companies don't actually do what is needed to guarantee uptime and manage to survive and succeed despite that.

I worked at a company that had Target and other Fortune 500 retailers as clients, and we had very strict SLAs with financial penalties if we broke them. There was absolutely the possibility that we could have ended up our clients more than they paid us.