Availability

Learn about availability, how to measure it, and its importance.

What is availability?

Availability is the percentage of time that some service or infrastructure is accessible to clients and is operated upon under normal conditions. For example, if a service has 100% availability, it means that the said service functions and responds as intended (operates normally) all the time.

Measuring availability

Mathematically, availability, A, is a ratio. The higher the A value, the better. We can also write this up as a formula:

We measure availability as a number of nines. The following table shows how much downtime is permitted when we’re using a given number of nines.

The Nines of Availability

Availability Percentages versus Service Downtime
Availability %	Downtime per Year	Downtime per Month	Downtime per Week
90% (1 nine)	36.5 days	72 hours	16.8 hours
99% (2 nines)	3.65 days	7.20 hours	1.68 hours
99.5% (2 nines)	1.83 days	3.60 hours	50.4 minutes
99.9% (3 nines)	8.76 hours	43.8 minutes	10.1 minutes
99.99% (4 nines)	52.56 minutes	4.32 minutes	1.01 minutes
99.999% (5 nines)	5.26 minutes	25.9 seconds	6.05 seconds
99.9999% (6 nines)	31.5 seconds	2.59 seconds	0.605 seconds
99.99999% (7 nines)	3.15 seconds	0.259 seconds	0.0605 seconds

Availability and service providers

Each service provider may start measuring availability at different points in time. Some cloud providers start measuring it when they first offer the service, while some measure it for specific clients when they start using the service. Some providers might not reduce their reported availability numbers if their service was not down for all the clients. The planned downtimes are excluded. Downtime due to cyberattacks might not be incorporated into the calculation of availability. Therefore, we should carefully understand how a specific provider calculates their availability numbers.