An old adage about choosing a hosting provider says that everyone promises 99.9% uptime so you need to test uptime of a site for the real picture. Or scour the forums for reviews and judge for yourself how reliable they are. That works too. What that saying is really getting at is the need for some kind of indicator that uptime does not fall below expectations, because you can’t just trust the word of the provider when your business is at stake.
It’s pretty safe to say that March was the month where everything changed for most of us. By now, enough has been said on coronavirus and we need not add to the pile. Our concern remains continuous uptime, and reporting on outages as teachable moments. During this time of heightened tensions, let’s take a few moments to do some post mortem work and see what we can learn from March’s outages.
Unplanned downtime can drive significant losses in the form of unrealized revenue. Teams may be caught off guard, or may face an outage outside their control, extending downtime hours unnecessarily. Without automated monitoring and alerting, teams face undetected outages that silently threaten SLA fulfillment. The recommendations in this report are best used as a guide on what trends may drive Site Reliability Engineering in the near term.
We’re all wrestling with less than ideal circumstances during the pandemic of COVID-19. Whether you’re sheltering in place or simply practicing social distancing, it’s safe to say we’re all adjusting to a temporary new normal. One commonality is the need for connectivity. If infrastructure fails, business will screech to a halt and we will find ourselves in a new kind of mess altogether.
TLS (and the previously used SSL) protocols make the web go round. They are fundamental when establishing a link between two computers, creating a very special mathematical relationship signified by the all-encompassing gesture of friendship: the handshake. So fundamental, in fact, that we probably take them for granted when we shouldn’t. The user relies on TLS encryption every day to protect data and the integrity of a session.
