What would you be doing right now if the Internet didn't exist? The world wide web as we know it is only a few decades old, but it's hard to imagine life without it. I fondly recall the early days of the "personal" Internet, when I used a 56k modem and waited anxiously for that oh-so-familiar connecting sound to access my AOL account and check if I had mail. We've come a long way from those humble beginnings.
APIs have become indispensable to modern digital businesses, not least because of their flexibility and ease of integration.
As questions and challenges loom over the tech industry and the larger economy, now is a perfect time for us to take a step back and learn from the past. As reliability engineers, we regularly use Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to understand the performance, reliability, and trends of our systems to help inform and prioritize our decision making.
The outages span the giants of the Internet and some of the biggest failures of IT resilience we were subject to – from AWS’s trifecta of outages in December 2021 to the October ‘21 outage that took down Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and interrelated services. We also look at some more intermittent outages that you may have missed.
Toil. Few other words have the same visceral impact for SREs as their four-letter nemesis: toil. Although pretty much everyone recognizes and agrees that toil is bad, it is a term that is frequently misused in colloquial use. In common English usage, toil is defined as “long strenuous fatiguing labor”. As a term of art in the SRE profession, “toil” has several very specific characteristics which distinguish it from other sorts of work which people spend time on.
Many of us (indeed 1 billion plus users worldwide) rely on Microsoft for essential work activities and were impacted yesterday (Wednesday January 25, 2023) when the cloud service provider experienced a prolonged outage. Internet Resilience is a business priority because when critical workforce services like Microsoft go down, global teams are hugely disrupted.
Network outages are both common and expensive – usually far more expensive than people realize. Yes, the network is down and the organization is losing money, but do you really appreciate how much money? And how much an outage can actually cost on a per minute basis? It’s not only more than most people think, it’s something that can be mitigated fairly easily.
