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[-] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Five nines means that you need people at their desks in shifts ready to start fixing something the moment there’s a problem

No, it means you don't have outages. Ever.

Five-nines is something like 7 minutes of downtime throughout the entire year. At best, you might have automated failover systems that require tiny outages. No human involvement, though, unless you're deal with some major breakage that would have killed the five-nines commitment that year, anyway.

It's takes a human something like 5-10 minutes just to get out of bed and figure out the situation, anyway.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 week ago

No, it means you don't have outages. Ever.

No, that's infinite nines, which isn't possible.

Five-nines is something like 7 minutes of downtime throughout the entire year. At best, you might have automated failover systems that require tiny outages. No human involvement, though, unless you're deal with some major breakage that would have killed the five-nines commitment that year, anyway.

Yes, you have automated failover systems. But, if something happens which causes those systems to fail over, you need to immediately investigate what happened and why. Even at four nines you have automatic failover, redundant system, hot spares, etc. But, you accept that sometimes not everything will work as planned and you'll need to fix something. Five nines is just that and more.

It's takes a human something like 5-10 minutes just to get out of bed and figure out the situation, anyway.

Right, which is why I said that four nines is your realistic maximum if you're going to have people on call who aren't actually at their desks. To get better than four nines you need to have around the clock coverage with people at their desks so when a system breaks you have eyes on it in something like 30s.

this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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