A wise engineer once said that only 3 things are for sure: death, taxes, and outages. And when an app goes down, it’s a colloquial Titanic event for a company – all hands on deck, engineers getting paged at odd hours of the night, and frantic Slack Huddles until they find the culprit (it’s usually DNS). But what exactly is an outage? What does it mean for an app to go down? And why can’t teams just build apps that never go down?
Please enjoy the following 2,000 words on every engineer’s greatest nightmare.