Originally Posted by
warrens
I get where you're going with this, but P99 is typically a lot easier to achieve in a SaaS environment than (say) 99% guarantee of immediate entry to YUL International. In the modern cloud hosted world, you don't need to make big changes in the physical world to accommodate much higher peak loads. At airports, you still do.
I wouldn't say it's easy in the cloud. It's true that most of the physical hardware changes are handled by GCP/AWS via Terraform and other IaaS tools, but the changes to the corresponding software architecture are also complex and expensive to implement. A system reliability project I worked on involved going from a single Redis instance to Redis cluster, database sharding, and deploying an event orchestration middleware to replace Kafka. The difficulty and complexity of a project aren't tied to the changes in physical hardwares.
While I don't think AC really owes us any tangible benefit that was never promised to begin with, I do believe that AC is responsible for diluting some of the benefits. The lounge situation is like building an infrastructure for 100 customers, but keep selling API keys because there is no SLA regarding uptime or latency anyway.