Availability · Estimate

Three independent replicas are each 95% available, and the service is up while any one of them is. How many minutes a month (30 days) is it down?

hard Replication

Answer

About 5.4 minutes per month. In review, anything from 3.6 to 8.1 counts as right.

The worked estimate

All three must be down at once: 0.05³ = 0.000125, so availability is 99.9875%. A month has 43,200 minutes: 43,200 × 0.000125 ≈ 5.4 minutes. Three mediocre replicas beat one excellent server, as long as their failures really are independent.

Numbers: Numbers to know.

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