However, for companies that rely heavily on uptime, such as utilities, telecommunications, e-commerce, and financial services companies, five minutes of downtime can be costly. For most companies, this is an acceptable amount of downtime. This equates to about five minutes of downtime per year. What is the maintenance window in five 9s availability?įive 9s availability means that a company’s apps or websites are operational 99.999% of the time. As a result, many organizations settle for less than five 9s availability. However, achieving five 9s availability can be difficult and expensive. For example, "five 9s" availability would mean that the system or service had events that were successful 99.999% of the time over a given period.įive 9s availability is often used as a goal or target for systems, servers, and services that need to be highly available. The "9s" refers to the percentage of time that the system or service is expected to be operational. The term “five 9s availability” is often used to describe how often a system, a server, or a service is available. How is five 9s availability connected to server uptime? ![]() Focus your investment on those critical services. However, most businesses do have a minority of cases where aiming for extremely high availability is warranted. In the majority of cases, trying to achieve more than that isn’t fiscally justified: it will cost you too much money and too much time, and you’ll be wasting resources where they aren’t needed. In fact, three 9s is an impressive result that takes thoughtful planning and investment. You may think you are prepared to deliver a high-availability service, but, in reality, availability at that level would just be a lucky coincidence.įor most of your services, the chances are customers won’t notice the difference between three or four 9s and five 9s. Probably not, especially since the more realistic outcome of trying to achieve five 9s is failure. You can think of it this way: every nine adds another zero to the end of your total cost of ownership (people and infrastructure). For a customer-facing service to be five 9s available, all the supporting services have to have even higher levels of availability. Each nine added to your availability percentage costs your organization an order of magnitude more. The question is an important one, for one very simple reason: cost.ĭelivering five 9s availability is expensive. or does it? Does it really take five 9s to keep your customers delighted with your service, especially when you look at their journey through your application? That’s why you hear so many people throwing around the term “five 9s” these days.Ĭustomers should be quite happy with five 9s availability, so setting that as a goal makes good sense. Enterprise infrastructure teams make the same argument. Some cloud providers even say the availability of their network is the most important facet of their services. Rather than aiming for too much of a good thing, you should prioritize your services and choose carefully the level of availability each service needs.Īvailability is the very definition of competitive advantage in cloud computing. Even small glitches in an available service can be extremely problematic what good is it if I can reach my bank’s app but check depositing won’t work? We are happier when applications, websites, and services are always available than when “the website (or server or network) is down.” A corollary more to the point: Unavailable apps equals unhappy customers-customers can’t use a service that’s down. Today, most people expect IT services to just work. What does it take to keep customers happy? This post answers those questions and explains how your teams can develop a common understanding of availability that focuses on the customer experience, not arbitrary availability metrics. How do you actually reach this level of availability when you need it?Īnd how do you know when you don’t need it? In a world where applications are delivered over public networks, the physics of achieving the goal of just five minutes of downtime per year makes this an expensive long shot at best. Management wants you to deliver a service as close to perfection as possible-but there is a downside to high availability. To put it into perspective, five 9s uptime would mean that a system could be down for no more than 5 minutes and 15 seconds in a year or about 6 seconds per week.Ĭall it what you will: Always On, Six Sigma, high availability, or five 9s. ![]() In the context of availability, this is often referred to as “perfect uptime” because it’s so close to 100%. ![]() This means that the system or process in question is operational 99.999% of the time. The term “five 9s” refers to a reliability level of 99.999%. Nines are a unit of measurement used to describe the reliability of a system or process.
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