Six Nines

Noun · Slang & Abbreviations

Definitions

  1. A shorthand boast or target for extremely high availability, roughly 99.9999 percent uptime. In engineering slang, six nines often carries a skeptical tone because claims that high demand very serious engineering and measurement discipline.

    In plain English: Very high uptime, used as shorthand for near-perfect availability.

    Example: "Marketing wanted to promise six nines, but the SRE team pushed back because the system still had too many manual recovery steps to say that with a straight face."

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