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07 Reliability and Operations

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02 Site Reliability Engineering

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01 Concept

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The Nines

The Nines

Feb 10, 20261 min read

  • sre
  • availability
  • nines

The Nines

← Back to SLAs, SLOs, SLIs

A shorthand for availability targets expressed as percentages of uptime. 99.9% (“three nines”) allows 8.76 hours of downtime per year. 99.99% (“four nines”) allows 52.6 minutes per year. Each additional nine requires roughly 10x the engineering investment.

Key Properties

  • Downtime Budget Calculation
  • Cost of Additional Nines
  • Diminishing Returns

sre availability nines


Graph View

  • The Nines
  • Key Properties

Backlinks

  • SLAs, SLOs, SLIs
  • Downtime Budget Calculation

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