Codepen Radio

Chris & Alex talk about DevOps, servers, and keeping CodePen online at all times. We were are 100% for the year until a few weeks ago when we had a 10 minute drop. That still keeps us in the realm of 99.99% uptime, where we get 52 minutes and 35 seconds of downtime per year, but next year we're shooting for 5-nines, that is, 99.999% uptime, where we only get 5 minutes and 16 seconds of downtime. Of course, our goals (and eventually, promises) can only be as strong as the service providers we use. Thankfully with providers like AWS and Cloudflare, we're in good hands. There are a number of things that have traditionally got in the way of this high of uptime, like database manipulation work. These days, we have the tech and the strategies for that, like seeding a newly manipulated database alongside the existing one and cutting over. We also have code in place for doing intelligent things like cutting off services if they become unreliable, rather than letting them bog down or kill the site entirely.