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Comment by gmisra | Hacker News Reader

FYI to S3 customers, per the SLA, most of us are eligible for a 10% credit for this billing period. But the burden is on the customer to provide incident logs and file a support ticket requesting said credit (it must be really challenging to programmatically identify outage coverage across customers /s)

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/

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The 10% savings of ~$10 does not compare to time/potential business lost, but thanks for the tip :)

> potential business lost

My startup's op team had a great discussion today because of this that basically boils down to "if we hit our sales goals, an incident like this a year from now would end our company".

Looks like our plans to start prepping for multi-cloud support will be a higher priority.

> an incident like this a year from now would end our company

I'm genuinely curious, what kind of business are you in that a four hour outage would end the company? High frequency trading or something?

You're in the right ball park- services for traders and brokers in the finance industry. A two hour outage during trading hours would be an extinction level event.

not op, but when i worked in the ticketing business if this happened during a big on sale we would get hosed.

A low-cost first step is enabling cross-region replication [1].

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/crr.html

I'd be willing to bet that the effort you put into a multi-cloud solution will be more expensive than you think, and far more brittle in the event of an emergency. It always is.

You're not wrong, but if your customers can't afford an outage, you can't afford not having a fallback plan. Probably worth a few trial runs during low volume hours to be sure.

thats for below 99.9% - they are at 99.997% .. you are never getting that 10% credit..

0.1% of 28 days is 40 minutes, so it seems likely to happen.

I was calculating it for a year - maybe the availability applies to per billing cycle - you may be correct..

You got your orders of magnitude wrong ;)

    99.9964583 = 100 - 153/(30*24*60)
    99.6458333 = 100 * (1 - 153/(30*24*60))

I was calculating it for a year - maybe the availability applies to per billing cycle.. I am still not able to understand your math - mind explaining

Your numbers are still off for a year.

    99.9997089 = 100 - 153/(365*24*60)
    99.9708904 = 100 - 100*153/(365*24*60)

The formula is 100% minus 100% times downtime/time in month/year.

153 is the number of minutes they were down going off the reported updates at https://status.aws.amazon.com/ - 11:35AM PST was when they fixed the status page, 2:08PM PST was when S3 was fully back online. (And 153 is underestimating it, because there were errors going on for long before they fixed the status page, but I don't have timestamps on that.)

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