Five nines, 99.999% uptime, used to be the gold standard. Then AI started writing the code, and even the biggest platforms began having very long days. So what’s the standard now? This blog looks past the five nines to find out.
Who writes this
I’m Rahul Sharma. I work in SRE and AI/ML engineering in New Jersey. Some days I build the infrastructure that runs AI agents and ML models. Other days I build the AI agents that manage and secure that infrastructure.
Every post starts with a real production incident and follows it from the first alert to the fix. No theory without a scar to go with it.
Sometimes I say all this out loud, most recently at devopsdays Philadelphia 2026.
Open source
Tools built during these investigations are published at github.com/beyond5nines.
brahmagupta — a CLI for inspecting Spark shuffle files. Built during the investigation in Part 3 of Look Ma, No Servers!