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Notes -
SRE is my day job :). Worked at one of these behemoths at some point, specifically deep on the infrastructure side of things.
None of these companies ever even dreamed of it. It's all about cheap hardware, multiple replicas, and the ability to reroute traffic between failure domains.
That's the thing--it's not constant. Like I mentioned earlier, companies do holiday code freezes so the rate of change decrease to a very small amount. Even security patches can be split into critical and non-critical, then those critical patches can be further split into "requires downtime" and "nothingburger."[1]
So if there's a feature freeze at twitter, then the rate of change is drastically reduced. And if people leave/get fired, that reduces the rate even further. And if you ignore all but the critical patches, then the rate begins approaching zero. That's a lot of "ifs", but all of them seem like good decisions with positive impact, also based in an accepted industry norm (code freezes), so I'm betting that management at Twitter will go down this path.
But let's wait and see! We're trying to infer what's happening inside of a black box. If my reality leans toward my bet, what I'm expecting to see is, over the course of the next year:
multiple instances of graceful degradation: users missing avatars for a few hours; intermittent general slowness; a few instances of data loss for a small group of users.
multiple instances of planned downtime.
a few instances of unplanned downtime, but no longer than 1-2 days.
Now, and correct if I'm wrong please, if reality leans toward your bet, what I would expect to see is:
multiple instances of unplanned downtime, ranging anywhere between a few hours to days, maybe even 1-2 weeks.
at least one prolonged outage (>4 weeks)
almost constant degradation of service: twitter being noticeably slower; multiple days when users can't log in; multiple instances of data loss for large (single digit %) group of users.
Let's see what happens!
[1]: Also, you reminded me about an oft overlooked source of change: shit expiring. Certificates, but also licenses, generators, and whatnot. These are silent killers, because they're hard to track and require manual work. I'm still counting them into my "low or no change" bet--that's where I would expect to see unplanned downtime that's fixed in a couple of hours.
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