Coffee and Design for Failure (opens in new tab)

I don't think the analogy is correct: suppose that John needed to buy life saving medicines. Would his course of action be reasonable and rational? No, because he would be dead. On mission critical systems you make damn well sure in advance you have a backup plan (or more if needed). John should have bought an extra set of medicines, and AWS should have had better backup plans - it seems to me that if it's taking so long to bring the systems up, there must be something not really well thought of there.

Context, please: what's "the Judgment Day Outage"?

(I presume knowing that would explain the purpose of the gedankenexperiment.)

John doesn't make money based on whether or not he gets a cup of coffee, so this whole question is worthless in my opinion.

Interesting such a question-filled post doesn’t have comments enabled. (Not that I’m criticizing it for this reason.)

I guess I’m not sure how relevant the parable is, because while it doesn’t cost have coffee & a pot at your house — and you will use it anyway, and it doesn’t cost anything day-to-day to just keep it there — this isn’t true for, say, having a backup system just waiting to take over in the event of catastrophic failure.

Then again, the Netflix strategy (3 clusters at 60% utilization → 2 clusters at 90%) is superficially similar to usually having an option of homebrew, walking, and driving for coffee, and sometimes just being forced to pick one option. Superficially.

For all John Doe knew, those events (road closed, rain + strong wind) were unlikely to happen, so planning for them would not have been rational. He did bring an umbrella when he saw a cloudy sky, which demonstrates good planning (even though it didn't work out in this particular case).