Article,
The Calculus of Service Availability
Communications of the ACM, 60 (9): 42--47 (September 2017)
DOI: 10.1145/3080202
Abstract
You're only as available as the sum of your dependencies. While readers are likely familiar with some or many of the concepts this article has covered, assembling this information and putting it into concrete terms may make the concepts easier to understand and teach. Its recommendations are uncomfortable but not unattainable. A number of Google services have consistently delivered better than four 9s of availability, not by superhuman effort or intelligence, but by thorough application of principles and best practices collected and refined over the years (see SRE's Appendix B: A Collection of Best Practices for Production Services).
