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They reduced their potential downtime from 60s to what I assume is only a few seconds (they don't state in the article).

If there is not noticeable user impact or unavailability of services (this is unique to each service in existence) then there is no downtime.




> they don't state in the article

Thank you for pointing this out. I updated the essay to mention how long the pause took explicitly:

After about a 3.5 second pause [^13], the failover function completed smoothly! We had a new Postgres instance serving requests, and best of all, nobody noticed.

[^13]: About 2.5 seconds to let active queries complete, and about 1 second for the replica to catch up


What is the [^13] notation? Is it different than a *?


They copy/pasted from the article, that's how they're formatting footnote links. Article has 15 footnotes and that's number 13.




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