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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

I'll let you in on the joke. The joke is the demand for 100% availability and instant gratification. we're making services where anything less than 4 nines, which is 5 minutes month, is deemed unacceptable. three nines is 10 minutes a week. two nines is 15 minutes a day. there are some things that are important enough that you can't take a coffee break and wait for, but Kubernetes lets you push four nines of availability, no problem. Kubernetes is solving for that level of availability, but my own body doesn't have anything near that level of availability. demanding that from everything and everyone else is what pushes for Kubernetes level of complexity.

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Most outages these days are also caused by "devops errors" that're much more likely to happen when working with complex infrastructure stacks. So there's real value in keeping things simple.

4 nines is a lie. That's not what I experience as a user. I experience 403, 404, 405, 500, or other forms of down, such as difficult captchas, 2fa not working, geolocation blockages etc several times a day.

Its a matter of evaluating what kind of infrastructure your application needs to run on. There are certainly mission critical systems where even a sliver of downtime causes real damage, like lost revenue. If you come to the conclusion that this application and everything it involves better run on k8s for availability reasons, you should probably focus on that and code your application in a k8s-friendly manner.

But there are tons of applications that run on over-engineered cloud environments that may or may not involve k8s and probably cost more to operate than they must. I use some tools every day where a daily 15 min downtime would not affect my or my work in the slightest. I am not saying this would be desirable per se. Its just that a lot of people (myself included) are happy to spend an hour of their work day talking to colleagues and drinking coffee, but a 15 min downtime of some tool is seen as an absolute catastrophe.

I agree with you in theory, and maybe even in practice in some cases, but I do not feel like we have less downtime with k8s than using anything else.

Are you the only one waiting on your app if it goes down?

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