Despite all of the snark here, in my experience Salesforce SRE team is quite competent. The engineering challenges of running a large PaaS - not just with own apps, but with millions of customer-written apps running on it - are quite interesting, and sadly things happen. The status page makes sense to actual customers, it's the particular "pods" where a given service runs.
Hacker News is much easier to read when you realize that 95% of people have never worked on a "high" (maybe we could say >1B requests per day as a starting point) scale distributed service and think it's trivial to run one with more than 2 nines. You see comments all the time here mentioning that their own desktop at home is achieving more than that which belies deep misunderstanding of how systems are measured. Or that unofficial github status page repeatedly posted here that counts all github services together into one number.
I think you are missing the point. When I state my Exchange server is more reliable than Exchange Online, I don't think I'm a better engineer. I recognize Microsoft has harder problems to solve than I do. I think building overengineered, oversized SaaS environments is introducing extreme risk. It's an inherent flaw of the current approach.
Smaller is, in fact, better, because it's easier to operate reliably.
Is it? When your internet is out for five days because your ISP takes a few days to get to you, do you acknowledge that you're now at 98.5% availability for the year, far worse than any SaaS email service?
I think people forget that those large environments are there for a reason. To make sure the service stays up in the face of problems outside your own control.
In my entire adult lifetime (mid 40s), my ISP has never been out for five days. Compare to Github, Microsoft, Salesforce, and AWS outages that are always occurring in some fashion. Reddit is down constantly in various ways and still continues to operate as a business, public no less, so I disagree about the need to chase five nines and broadly speaking, large distributed systems that are potentially unnecessary for the use case and target outcome.
stmw · · focus · HN ↗
Anon1096 · · focus · HN ↗
ocdtrekkie · · focus · HN ↗
I think you are missing the point. When I state my Exchange server is more reliable than Exchange Online, I don't think I'm a better engineer. I recognize Microsoft has harder problems to solve than I do. I think building overengineered, oversized SaaS environments is introducing extreme risk. It's an inherent flaw of the current approach.
Smaller is, in fact, better, because it's easier to operate reliably.
jedberg · · focus · HN ↗
I think people forget that those large environments are there for a reason. To make sure the service stays up in the face of problems outside your own control.
toomuchtodo · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22is%20down%22&sort=byDate&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
temp_praneshp · · focus · HN ↗
(I hope you'll agree that the middle east outage is a true outlier)