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Comment by Animus7 | Hacker News Reader

100% uptime is possible, and it's possible today. Nobody complains that their torrents are ever "down".

So to correct: 100% uptime is not possible... with a central point of failure such as a datacenter.

Ironically enough, I have an... interesting service provider at this location who aggressively throttles peer connections. I've been using torrific as a workaround, which, in turn, uses AWS.

So yes. My torrents are "down".

Your torrents aren't "down". In the same sense that having a theoretical crappy ISP that blocks GMail doesn't mean your GMail is "down".

When we talk about downtime we usually mean a global outage, for most everyone.

That's what happened at Amazon. This never happens for an active torrent. And it's all by design.

I think "feasible" is more of the discussion. Interesting how we learned during the 08 financial crisis that everything is correlated in a crash... I think there are similarities to the cloud, Black Swan fat tails if you will.

I thought about including some mention of this. I'm sure Amazon though this specific crisis as a six-sigma event. Taleb points out in the book Black Swan, the sum of all possible six-sigma events happens a lot more often.

Fair enough. I should clarify that it is not impossible, only impossible for now with our existing structures. I think we will get there.

Except Netflix weathered this well... those sites just didn't build their infrastructure out to handle this.

Netflix has downtime just not full outages, it didn't work for my family and we've had other downtime with them in the recent past. They even sent us a credit a month or two ago because of the outage. Their infrastructure is such that it doesn't go down for everyone, but it does go down from time to time for a subset of their subscribers.

Cross provider scaling is not easy, but necessary for companies of a different size. I expect Quora (and others) to make some changes after this.

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