“UPTIME? We don’t care - we’re a subscription business.”

This sounds wrong in so many aspects. Still it has some truth to it. Let me start with a disclaimer: It’s neither originated from a current or former customer, nor does it reflect how current or prior employers of mine are operating or thinking. It’s just me exaggerating a brainstorming with some folks.

But let’s start with what feels wrong with it? Where to start and where to end? “Shows disregard for customer experience and service reliability” “Undermines customer trust and loyalty” “Could lead to increased customer churn” “May violate terms of service” [..]

I stop here, but I’m sure that you will have many more negative aspects of this in your mind.  So it’s wrong. We agree, right? We need 100% reliability at all times.

Hmm, well - that might be expensive in the end we might not be running a “nuclear plant”. Maybe we shall compromise?

This is exactly a discussion architects should have with business stakeholders, Reliability can mean many different things, it really depends on the context. Reliability comes usually with a price tag, so we need to see if the use case on the one end requires the next reliability and if we can afford it. Smart architectures can keep reliability challenges away from customers.  So in the end it’s a trade-off - like always. A better way to phrase it would be to say " uptime, we do care! At the same time, we balance it against other business priorities"

So all of this started easy but now got complicated. What do you think?

If you want to dive deeper into how to build reliable systems in an effective manner, I suggest a couple of resources:

• What have restaurants and Cloud Architectures in common? What can we learn from running a restaurant? Dive deeper in Michael Haken’s “Resilience lessons from the lunch rush”: https://lnkd.in/eVz6Y7fx

• The AWS Well-Architected Framework has a dedicated pillar covering aspects of reliability. Helps you to ask the right questions and derive the right conclusions: https://lnkd.in/e-ESPkmN

• “Everything fails, all the time” Amazon’S CTO Werner Vogels once said: https://lnkd.in/eHj55cR8

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