Hacker News Reader

I recently witnessed an argument between a dev manager and the devops team lead.

The manager manager was convinced that fixing all of the bugs would lead to perfect, 100% successful execution. The devops team lead spent an hour trying to explain why the software couldn’t achieve better reliability than AWS (the system spread across AWS zones, but each instance was contained within a single zone).

View on HN

This sounds like a possible explanation for why I keep getting recommended different AWS client libraries from the boss to "solve instability" of a service that works 99.8% except for when the S3 endpoint (backblaze) has brief mystery issues.

100% successful execution is possible, assuming

1. You can guarantee no bugs in your system

2. You can guarantee no bugs in AWS's systems

3. You can guarantee there's no nuclear attacks on us-east-1 within the next year or so

You've entirely forgotten routine hardware failure. At large enough scale all sorts of weird stuff happens.

No cosmic rays ;)

And no network cables or ISPs...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com