On Jul 3, 2012, at 10:58 AM, Ryan Malayter <malay...@gmail.com> wrote:
> James Downs wrote: >> For Netflix (and all other similar >> services) downtime is money and money is downtime. There is a >> quantifiable cost for customer acquisition and a quantifiable churn >> during each minute of downtime. Mature organizations actually calculate >> and track this. The trick is to ensure that you have balanced the cost >> of greater redundancy vs the cost of churn/customer acquisition. If you >> are spending too much on redundancy, it's as big of mistake as spending >> too little. > > Actually, for Netflix, so long as downtime is infrequent or short > enough that users don't cancel, it actually saves them money. They're > not paying royalties for movies being streamed during downtime, but > they're still collecting their $8/month. There is no meaningful SLA > for the end user to my knowledge. > > I imagine the threshold for *any* user churn based on downtime is very > high for Netflix. So long as they are "about as good as > cable/sattelite TV" in terms of uptime Netflix will do fine. You would > have to get into 98% uptime or lower before people would really start > getting irritated enough to cancel. Of course multiple short outages > would be more painful than a few longer ones from a customer's > perspective. > > I imagine Netflix is mature enough to track this data as you suggest, > and that's why they use AWS - downtime isn't a big deal for their > business unless it gets really, really bad. > My thoughts exactly!