-----Original Message----- From: James Downs [mailto:egon@egon.cc]
On Jul 2, 2012, at 7:19 PM, Rodrick Brown wrote:
People are acting as if Netflix is part of some critical service they stream movies for Christ sake. Some acceptable level of loss is fine for 99.99% of Netflix's user base just like cable, electricity and running water I suffer a few hours of losses each year from those services it suck yes, is it the end of the world no..
You missed the point.
And very publically missed the point, too. The Netflix issues led to a large discussion of downtime, testing, and fault tolerance that has been very useful for the community and could lead to some good content for NANOG conferences (/pokes PC). For Netflix (and all other similar services) downtime is money and money is downtime. There is a quantifiable cost for customer acquisition and a quantifiable churn during each minute of downtime. Mature organizations actually calculate and track this. The trick is to ensure that you have balanced the cost of greater redundancy vs the cost of churn/customer acquisition. If you are spending too much on redundancy, it's as big of mistake as spending too little. Also, I don't think there is an acceptable level of downtime for water. Neither do water utilities. - Dan