The 6 nines mean that an ideal service should have 99,9999% uptime, right?
That’s almost 32 seconds of downtime in a year!
If so, how much would it cost to do it? (Let’s consider that is a marketplace site with 1000 daily users)
The 6 nines mean that an ideal service should have 99,9999% uptime, right?
That’s almost 32 seconds of downtime in a year!
If so, how much would it cost to do it? (Let’s consider that is a marketplace site with 1000 daily users)
This.
At some point, you need to be able to quantify the risk to your business before you can do this.
For instance, if your business earns $10 per transaction, and you perform 100 transactions per second, the difference between five and six nines (313 seconds vs 31 seconds) is $282,000; nowhere near enough to justify the added investment.
However, if you perform ten thousand transactions per second, the difference is $28.2M. Which, frankly, is still not enough for the added staff and infrastructure costs that would be required. Enough for other mitigations, sure, but not six nines.
For reference, Visa is pretty widely quoted to do 24,000 transactions per second. Suffice to say, as Notorious stated, it is really really difficult.
Edit: Important to note that for the first example, these are already enormously huge numbers. Such a business, assuming no holidays or weekends, would be grossing $31.5 billion per year, in the same ballpark as Oracle and Coca Cola.
So when we say the company is losing 282,000, this is a tiny, tiny fraction of revenue. Even 99.5%, which is almost two days of downtime, would “only” be a loss of 0.5% of all revenue for the year. Sure, this is $157M, but even that would probably not cover the cost of a six nines infrastructure.
That said, they could save up to $120M per year by going to 99.9%, and that might be doable.