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124 points edent | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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ForHackernews ◴[] No.42725944[source]
Unpopular opinion, but I think many systems would benefit from a regular "downtime window". Not everything needs to be 24/7 high availability.

Maybe not every night, but if you get users accustomed to the idea that you're offline for 12 hours every Sunday morning, they will not be angry when you need to be offline for 12 hours on a Sunday morning to do maintenance.

The stock market closes, more things should close. We are paying too high of a price for 99.999% uptime when 99.9% is plenty for most applications.

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kragen ◴[] No.42726175[source]
Basically this happens because the DVLA and the stock market don't have any competition. Customers in a competitive market won't be angry when you need to be offline for 12 hours every Sunday morning; they'll just switch to your competitor some Sunday, because the competitor is providing them something they value that you don't provide.
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ForHackernews ◴[] No.42726266[source]
Maybe they should regulate Sunday trading hours, or unionized sysadmins should negotiate the end of on-call hours.

The red queen's race that you describe for ever-greater scale, ever-greater availability is an example of the tragedy of the commons. Think how much money and many human minds have been wasted trying to squeeze out that last .0001% of "zero downtime" when they could have been creating something new.

"Keep doing the same thing, but more of it, harder" is a recipe for a barren world of monoculture.

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kragen ◴[] No.42726771[source]
Something like that might plausibly be correct, though you've exaggerated it to a level where it's clearly false.

If we steelman it to its most defensible essence, I think what you're saying is that the cost of the human effort needed to provide these higher uptimes exceeds the consumer benefit (the value of being able to buy a camera on Saturday), say. You could imagine, for example, that each incremental improvement in uptime wins over a proportion of the customer base providing a value that vastly exceeds its cost — but only until your competitors improve their own offering to match, so all the surplus from all this uptime improvement ultimately goes to the consumers, not the producers.

There are two related holes in this idea.

The first is that producing consumer surplus is what the economy is for, in a moral sense. The reason producing goods and services is a good thing to do is so that someone will benefit from using them! So if all the effort that sysadmins make goes into making services better for users, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

The second is that nothing is stopping a new entrant from offering a new, low-cost service that isn't as reliable. If the cost of providing all that extra reliability (bundled into the incumbents' pricing scheme) is higher than the actual benefit to users, the users will switch to the lower-cost, less-reliable service. This has happened many times, in fact: less-reliable minicomputers stole business from mainframes, less-reliable VoIP stole business from ATM and SONET and SDH, all kinds of less-reliable plastic goods have stolen business from all-metal versions, and now solar panels are stealing business from coal power plants even though solar panel "uptime" is like 30%.

So the particular market dynamics we're talking about actually sensitively optimize the amount of effort given to uptime to the economic optimum. There do exist lots of market failures, but the particular dynamic we're discussing is the opposite extreme from something like a dollar auction.

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1. ForHackernews ◴[] No.42748362[source]
Thank you for at least considering the idea seriously. I think the flaw with your argument is the assumption that price-sensitive consumers are paying directly for these services. Advertisers pay google, not people who use Gmail. In many cases, there's no way for a competitor to compete on price offering a cheaper service - because it's already "free" in the mind of consumers.

Also, please note: scheduled downtime is not the same thing as "less-reliable". A service that is always available when it promises to be might be said to be more reliable than a service that offered more availability but failed unpredictably at random.

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2. kragen ◴[] No.42749375[source]
I think it's important to consider ideas seriously.

These are interesting points, and it's true that I wasn't thinking about things from those angles. I'm not sure if the differences are relevant, though?