I think reasonable people can disagree on this.

From the point of view of an individual developer, it may be "fraction of tasks affected by downtime" - which would lie between the average and the aggregate, as many tasks use multiple (but not all) features.

But if you take the point of view of a customer, it might not matter as much 'which' part is broken. To use a bad analogy, if my car is in the shop 10% of the time, it's not much comfort if each individual component is only broken 0.1% of the time.

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remus 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> But if you take the point of view of a customer, it might not matter as much 'which' part is broken. To use a bad analogy, if my car is in the shop 10% of the time, it's not much comfort if each individual component is only broken 0.1% of the time.

Not to go too out of my way to defend GH's uptime because it's obviously pretty patchy, but I think this is a bad analogy. Most customers won't have a hard reliability on every user-facing gh feature. Or to put it another way there's only going to be a tiny fraction of users who actually experienced something like the 90% uptime reported by the site. Most people are in practice are probably experienceing something like 97-98%.

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fwip 2 days ago | parent [-]

Sorry, by 'customer' I meant to say something like a large corporate customer - you're buying the whole package, and across your org, you're likely to be a little affected by even minor outages of niche services.

But yeah, totally agree that at the individual level, the observed reliability is between 90% and 99%, and probably toward the upper end of that range.

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wang_li 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A better analogy is if one bulb in the right rear brake light group is burnt out. Technically the car is broken. But realistically you will be able to do all the things you want to do unless the thing you want to do is measure that all the bulbs in your brake lights are working.

	▲	Dylan16807 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's an awful analogy because "realistically you will be able to do all the things you want to do". If a random GitHub service goes down there's a significant chance it breaks your workflow. It's not always but it's far from zero. One bulb in the cluster going out is like a single server at GitHub going down, not a whole service.

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mememememememo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Or if your kettle is not working the house is considered not working?

	▲	Polizeiposaune 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I've been on a flight that was late leaving the gate because the coffeemaker wasn't working.