Availability: How much of the time a system is up and usable, often written as a percentage such as 99.9%.
Example
A promise of 99.9% availability allows less than nine hours of downtime in a year.
Why Availability matters for IT interns
It explains why teams are careful with production changes and treat outages so seriously.
Where you will hear it
You will hear this term when your team builds, deploys, and runs software on servers and cloud platforms. If someone uses it and you are not sure what they mean in your project, it is completely fine to ask; every team uses terms a little differently.
Related terms
- AWS: Amazon Web Services: Amazon’s cloud platform and one of the most widely used.
- CI/CD: The combined automated process of building, testing and deploying code, usually set up as a "pipeline".
- Cloud Computing: Using computing resources such as servers, storage and databases over the internet from a provider, instead…
- Cloud Storage: Storing files and data on a cloud provider’s servers and accessing them over the internet.
- Container: A lightweight package containing an application and everything it depends on, which runs the same way on any…
- Continuous Deployment (CD): Automatically releasing tested changes to an environment, sometimes all the way to production.
Previous term: Automation Testing | Next term: AWS
Related guides
Frequently asked questions
What is Availability?
How much of the time a system is up and usable, often written as a percentage such as 99.9%.
What is an example of Availability?
A promise of 99.9% availability allows less than nine hours of downtime in a year.
Why does Availability matter for IT interns?
It explains why teams are careful with production changes and treat outages so seriously.
Explore more internship terms
The IT Internship Glossary explains 199 terms you will hear before and during your internship, with simple definitions and real examples.
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About the author
Dhaivat has 16+ years of experience in the IT industry, working on AI and cloud technologies, project delivery, and engineering leadership. He has interviewed and mentored many interns, wrote The Lost Intern, and runs the non-commercial Career Impact Initiative, mentoring students for free.