SREReliabilityArchitectureDevOps
The Real Cost of 99.5% vs 99.99% Uptime
Sean Lobjoit··1 min read
The difference between 99.5% and 99.99% uptime?
43 hours vs. 52 minutes of downtime per year.
For many businesses, that's not a nice-to-have. It's the difference between keeping your customer and losing them.
What 99.99% Actually Requires
- Multi-region active-active architecture
- Automated failover
- Zero-downtime deployments
- Comprehensive monitoring with auto-remediation
- Regular chaos engineering
The Trade-offs
It's definitely not cheap, it's not easy and usually requires changes to your application's architecture to support the above.
If however, your business depends on being available, it's non-negotiable.
What uptime SLA does your product target?