FYI Netflix is down

Tue Jul 3 13:11:11 UTC 2012

> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Downs [mailto:egon at egon.cc]
> 
> 
> On Jul 2, 2012, at 7:19 PM, Rodrick Brown 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..
> 
> You missed the point.

And very publically missed the point, too. The Netflix issues led to a
large discussion of downtime, testing, and fault tolerance that has been
very useful for the community and could lead to some good content for
NANOG conferences (/pokes PC). For Netflix (and all other similar
services) downtime is money and money is downtime. There is a
quantifiable cost for customer acquisition and a quantifiable churn
during each minute of downtime. Mature organizations actually calculate
and track this. The trick is to ensure that you have balanced the cost
of greater redundancy vs the cost of churn/customer acquisition. If you
are spending too much on redundancy, it's as big of mistake as spending
too little. 

Also, I don't think there is an acceptable level of downtime for water.
Neither do water utilities. 

- Dan