FYI Netflix is down

Tue Jul 3 06:06:33 UTC 2012

On Jul 2, 2012, at 7:19 PM, Rodrick Brown <rodrick.brown at gmail.com> wrote:

> People are acting as if Netflix is part of some critical service they stream movies for Christ sake.  Some acceptable level of loss is fine for 99.99% of Netflix's user base just like cable, electricity and running water I suffer a few hours of losses each year from those services it suck yes, is it the end of the world no..

Actually calculating - understanding - cost of downtime, and what variations on that exist over time, are keys to reliability engineering.

But if you plan to cover X failure scenarios and only cover X/2 failure scenarios due to implementation glitches you goofed.

The right answer may be "relax and accept the downtime" and it may be "spend $10 million dollars to avoid most of these".  If you haven't thought it through and quantified, do so...

George William Herbert
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