A quirk learned after years of professional “What-if”ing Several years ago in a blog post by James Hamilton (Distinguished Engineer at AWS), I read a phrase that has really stuck with me: “At scale, rare events aren’t rare.” Consider operating a service that has a nice-sounding 99.99% success rate, it fails “rarely”, only 0.01% of the time. If the service is used millions times per day, it fails
Professional What-If’ing
Professional What-If’ing
Professional What-If’ing
A quirk learned after years of professional “What-if”ing Several years ago in a blog post by James Hamilton (Distinguished Engineer at AWS), I read a phrase that has really stuck with me: “At scale, rare events aren’t rare.” Consider operating a service that has a nice-sounding 99.99% success rate, it fails “rarely”, only 0.01% of the time. If the service is used millions times per day, it fails