Reliability: It’s not great

One of my colleagues keeps repeating “reliability is our number one feature”.

I’m not sure it is for 100% of early stage startups, but I guess it is once you exceed some minimum usage threshold.

That said, definitely appreciate the detailed explanation.

> One of my colleagues keeps repeating “reliability is our number one feature”.

I think reliability is the #1 feature at any stage because if you're unavailable, you're at best useless and more than likely you are actively harmful because your users have an expectation.

However, if you're unavailable outside of times customers don't expect you to be there then you're not actually unavailable. This is more likely for an early stage start-up, but you don't typically choose or know when you're expected to be available nor do you always get to choose when you're unavailable.

> One of my colleagues keeps repeating “reliability is our number one feature”.

> I’m not sure it is for 100% of early stage startups,

I mean, it probably depends on the nature of the startup? Platform-as-service seems particularly sensitive to reliability (whether or not it's "#1 feature"), in a way that might not be true of startups in other spaces.

In terms of confidentiality, availability, and integrity: I'll bet LastPass would gladly trade availability right now to regain confidentiality.

TL;DR -- It's very domain specific if reliability is your number one feature.

For a startup that is hosting other people's production application/data then this is absolutely true. Less than 100% always needs to be addressed.

For a startup that is selling bingo cards then reliability probably isn't nearly as important. I'm guessing there were certain holidays that were more important than others as far as reliability goes though? Maybe patio11 can chime in :)

Our team at AWS had a poster up on the wall that more or less went:

1. Security

2. Durability

3. Availability

4. Speed

Similar: https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1071088017190711296

That's what crossing the chasm is about. Before the chasm are tinkerers who don't mind things failing as much, but after it, people want reliable things that Just Work.