Microsoft refuses to join the Zero Outage brigade, Google and AWS keep mum

Re: Common Sense

Hardware aside they really should be able to guarantee at least with their server products software issues won't ever bring the OS down (at least on some officially supported configurations). Not sure if HP-UX guarantees it but never once seen an software caused OS crash with it. Of course in that case HP does control the type of hardware the OS supports and most important the device drivers. If you don't have the source for every driver that you say your OS officially supports then yeah its a kamikaze mission to guarantee anything.

Re: Common Sense

Absolutes are always a myth. However, the internet has never reached the level of reliability that would normally be expected from something that we call infrastructure. Unfortunately with constant development and sales demanding new things be implemented before they can reasonably be considered out of beta, things don't look like they're going to improve any time soon. Microsoft knows this.

But why would they be interested in joining?

People without the experience are interested in joining to gain experience from other people and avoid the problems they have had. If your a large player and have already figured out more than the group, then it's in your interest not to co-operate. The competition then discovers the problems the hard way, costing them money and reputation in downtime, plus time spent figuring out how to prevent that problem.

You ONLY join something like this if your expecting some gain out of it, and in this case the PR gain from joining isn't worth the expense of handing the competition your experience and procedures because these are as much of an asset as money is. This sort of stuff for an operations place is the same as source code is to a software house, you don't give it to your competition to have a look.