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by tutfbhuf 950 days ago
Based on my experience, uptime for the Generally Available (GA) services in the cloud typically ranges between 99.9% and 99.95% (maximum 8 hours and 41 minutes of downtime per year in case of 99.9) for a single region. This aligns with my long-term experience as a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) user. If you use preview or beta versions of services, the reliability may be lower, but then you're taking on that risk yourself.

Should you require greater than 99.95% uptime for particularly critical operations, then opting for a multi-region approach, such as using multi-region storage buckets, is advisable. It's also worth mentioning that I have never experienced a full 8 hours of downtime at once in a given year. It has usually been a case of increased error rates or heightened latency due to the inherent redundancy provided by availability zones within each region. Just make sure your network calls have a retry mechanism and you should be fine in almost all cases.
1 comments
withinboredom 950 days ago
On my first day ever in production on AWS, we had an entire 9 hours of downtime[1]... so maybe I'm a bit biased, especially because we had another one not too long after that one[2] on Christmas freaking Eve. Prior to moving to AWS, resolution timelines were able to be passed to stakeholders within minutes of discovering the issue. After moving to AWS, we played darts and looked like fools because there was nothing we could do while the company hemorrhaged money.

The cloud is much more mature as is dev-ops in general, these days, but major outages still happen. If you run your own cloud, you'll still have major outages. You can't really escape them.

If you have the expertise or can get the expertise, to do it in-house, you should do it. Just look to the US and its inability to build an in-expensive rocket, or even just manufacture goods. They outsourced everything (basically) to the point where they are reliant on the rest of the world for basic necessities.

You gotta think long-term, not short-term.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/message/680342/

[2]: https://aws.amazon.com/message/680587/

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