Nobody can guarantee that something

[JamieLanger]

Nobody can guarantee that something absolutely won't go down. You can't even guarantee that with your servers sitting in the "server room" in your offices. A rat could chew a cable and your users can't reach the servers. Or worst case, your whole building goes up in flames. With a WAN, a lightening strike, a car crash, an earthquake, a city-wide blackout, or a whole bunch of other possibilities could take it down. Hopefully those things are rare, but they are possibilities. Anyone that claims a connection will NEVER go down is either ignorant or lying.

 

[SamBones]

Not sure what your point is. Are you just ranting?

It IS possible to have so much redundancy that a service, like a web site, has effectively a zero percent chance of going down unless something seriously catastrophic happens. So for all practical purposes, it won't go down unless you bring it down.

We have a data center that is hooked to both the Los Angeles and Orange County power grids at the same time so if all of LA loses power, it will still be up. There is a huge room with enough batteries to power the entire raised floor for over an hour. There are generators that will kick in at any time with enough diesel fuel to power the raised floor for a week, with contracts to supply more fuel well ahead of demand. The web site itself runs on somewhere between 70 and 90 machines in this data center, so a few machines going down has literally no impact. This is one of four sites like it spread across the country. When you type in our URL, a global load balancer decides which site is up and closest to you, and sends you there.

So yes, if Russia decided to nuke four American cities, our site would be down. But what are the real odds of that happening.

If you're talking about cloud providers, then you could have some risk if you don't do it right. We use a certain cloud provider and one of the options when spinning up an instance is which city do you want it in. Even though much is in that cloud provider's hands, you can still make sure you have geographic distribution for whatever reason you have.

With enough money, you can mitigate almost any risk.

Taking the same attitude, I can also say that there's no such thing as an infinite loop! All loops have a point in time when they started, and none will go for an infinite amount of time from that starting point.

Given this code...

    while ( 1 == 1 ) {
        printf("Hi Mom!\n");
        }

If you compile it and run it, it will start printing "Hi Mom!" over and over, but it won't be an infinite loop. At some point you will get bored and kill it, or the machine will crash or reboot, or a truck will crash into your house, or you will die of old age and someone will turn off your computer, or the Sun will become a red giant in 5 billion years and destroy everythng on the face of the Earth. So not an infinte loop. An annoying loop, yes, a programming bug, yes, but nowhere near infinite.

But, for all practical purposes ... it's an infinite loop.

 

[jswami335]

Not sure just got confused after this loop.