[ctvo]

> I realized is that when you buy something like AWS, you're often paying for the platinum version, with redundant power, networking, etc, and not the bronze version, which a lot of people would settle for.

This is the difference in most cases.

Just taking availability as an example. Datadog has a 99.8% availability SLA. I suspect most companies would be fine paying for a 99% availability SLA, for example, at 1/4th the cost, but in most cases there's no way to scale down SLAs like that and launch a cheaper version.

There is a giant leap in cost (complexity, staffing, etc.) between 99% and 99.9% that most of these home grown solutions don't account for.

These nuances are lost in posts like these, and it is tiring.

[Dylan16807]

99% is down three days a year, and 99.8% can still go down for 17 hours each year.

Neither of those is particularly hard to reach. The cost increase to go from one to the other is not a big percentage.

What do you even get if the SLA is breached? Looking it up I see it excludes planned maintenance, and "in the event the Service availability drops below 99.8% for two consecutive months, Customer may terminate the Service". That's useless.