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Comment by okcwarrior | Hacker News Reader

Having VSTS down all day meant I got exactly 0 done today. Completely crazy to me.

For me, it's even crazier to rely on a third party provider to be able to do my work. I wouldn't be comfortable at all knowing that my development infrastructure is beyond my control.

Not intended to be snarky: why is this crazy to you? All cloud providers have had downtime incidents, major hosted VCS providers, SaaS products. Downtime is a fact of life in tech.

Hrm. I've worked at a large tech firm for more than a decade and there has never been a full day where VCS or the build farm were down all day. It's notable when it's down for more than twenty minutes.

As counterpoint, I’ve seen banks down for extended periods of time, hours occasionally stretching to a day or two (TSB, LLoyds, Bank Of America, BankSimple [BBVA]). Downtime is a fact of life. Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft have had major cloud outages. GitLab nuked their production DB. Slack and Reddit are frequently down.

Unless it’s life critical (911, air traffic control), if it’s down its only going to hamper productivity, but it’ll be back eventually. Time to stretch and get a coffee, and if it’s all day, going home and we’ll start fresh tomorrow.

We’re not saving lives, we’re just building websites. Downtime isn’t shameful, it happens to all of us.

If a single bank is down or Reddit (lol) then the impact is fairly limited, but if one of the 3 major cloud providers, which powers large parts of the internet is down for an entire day, then the impact is a little bit more critical I would say ;).

There's a reason why Azure has a SLA and Reddit doesn't ;)

Also if you start comparing the big companies with GitLab then we don't have to continue talking anymore. It's not ok to nuke your production db and that's why everyone in the tech scene laughs about GitLab and comparing them to Azure is like comparing a lego house to brick and mortar.

At GitLab we are always trying to iterate and we learned a lot from our incident with the database.

The one thing we are proud of is our transparency. The community really appreciates our openness and we are happy about it.

Here's the one example https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-...

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