> Here’s a little-known secret: most six-nines reliability software projects are developed using a waterfall methodology.
I've designed and deployed Tier 1 services for a Big Tech company, and here's is a little-known secret: when nothing changes, our reliability is higher than six-nines.
Last year I measured our uptime during Black Friday for fun. Our error rate was measured in scientific notation because the number was so small. We didn't do any deployments or changes during that period.
When you operate in a steady state it's easy to achieve zero errors, and most downtime comes from random failures in hardware, i.e. servers crashing or network blips (which, operating at scale, are relatively common).
So my and other's personal experience is that most outages are due to changes in the software, dependency outages, or the rare large scale event that completely kills your SLA (e.g. a whole AWS region is down). Taming these is at the essence of reliable software.
Whoever tells you that the best software is made using waterwall methodologies from a fixed and never changing set of specifications, lives in a fantasyland alien to the vast majority of developers.
I've designed and deployed Tier 1 services for a Big Tech company, and here's is a little-known secret: when nothing changes, our reliability is higher than six-nines.
Last year I measured our uptime during Black Friday for fun. Our error rate was measured in scientific notation because the number was so small. We didn't do any deployments or changes during that period.
When you operate in a steady state it's easy to achieve zero errors, and most downtime comes from random failures in hardware, i.e. servers crashing or network blips (which, operating at scale, are relatively common).
So my and other's personal experience is that most outages are due to changes in the software, dependency outages, or the rare large scale event that completely kills your SLA (e.g. a whole AWS region is down). Taming these is at the essence of reliable software.
Whoever tells you that the best software is made using waterwall methodologies from a fixed and never changing set of specifications, lives in a fantasyland alien to the vast majority of developers.