Hacker News Reader

On a geological time scale, it's probably more economical to cut through them and shave time off of every journey between eruption events.

View on HN

Maybe, but we could create a transport infrastructure that has 99.9999% uptime instead of 99% uptime.

It would be more economical for Google to use 99% uptime systems but they do go the extra mile for 99.9999% uptime.

I doubt it would be more economical. I strongly suspect someone did the analysis, determined that at five 9s they earn $X, at six 9s they earn $Y, and the difference between the two is large enough to be worth funding the projects to get there.

As a career SRE - this is more or less categorically false. In the specific case of Google, it is absolutely false.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com