In 2014 we had outages totaling 16-21 minutes (depending on how you count an outage) for an availability of 99.996%. This is down from 99.998% in 2013.
As usual, we do a year end (well, almost – there are still 7 days to go as this is written) report on our availability for the year. Here is a list of all of our availability issues.
We were totally unavailable on:
- Oct. 2: 5 Minutes
- Dec. 1: 8 Minutes
We had partial outages:
- May 6: 2 minutes affecting half of our users
- August 4: 4 minutes affecting about 1/8 of our users
We had delayed service during a major database upgrade on July 15 that took less than 4 minutes. Users experienced no outage, but depending on what they were doing would have had about a 2 minute delay in the system during check out. Otherwise, there may have been minor delays.
In some ways, we are proud that we have a system where we were able to push 1,847 new deployments of the system this year (yes, we really had 1,847 separate deployments with improvements, however incremental, each time) with very limited outage. This is a major advantage to our customers as we are able to make very rapid changes and “continuously improve” our system without impacting ongoing transactions. Except for that one major database upgrade, we are able to add tables to the database while people are in the middle of signing up for a race and not impact the users at all.
On the other hand, we want to continue to strive for that elusive 100%. In the mean time, we will continue to communicate our issues in an open manner so we can all learn from our mistakes and problems.