Re:Your nines are not my nines
by consciouskernel on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @02:39AM
(#20457072)
I work for a company in a similar situation, and I agree.
The author wants us to look at things from the customer's perspective. The thing is, we (and presumably all major cloud providers) do. Every feature released, every API call, has a canary associated with it that does nothing but pretend to be a customer using that feature. There are definitely cases that slip through the cracks that shouldn't have (we forgot to properly test for a certain condition or combination use case etc) but the vast majority of the time a customer experiences an outage it's because of something the customer did.
That's not to excuse the 5 9 guarantee that inspires fake confidence. But we're always upfront with customers that there's a shared responsibility for availability: it's our responsible to make sure what customers pay for works, but it's also a customer's responsibility that there's enough redundancy in their architecture for their use case.
The author wants us to look at things from the customer's perspective. The thing is, we (and presumably all major cloud providers) do. Every feature released, every API call, has a canary associated with it that does nothing but pretend to be a customer using that feature. There are definitely cases that slip through the cracks that shouldn't have (we forgot to properly test for a certain condition or combination use case etc) but the vast majority of the time a customer experiences an outage it's because of something the customer did.
That's not to excuse the 5 9 guarantee that inspires fake confidence. But we're always upfront with customers that there's a shared responsibility for availability: it's our responsible to make sure what customers pay for works, but it's also a customer's responsibility that there's enough redundancy in their architecture for their use case.