There was no downtime of the steem blockchain, but there was a downtime of the steemit RPC node that the majority of sites and services built on the steem blockchain use to get their data.
This is exactly the type of problem these developments will help to solve. With Appbase and RocksDB it will be much cheaper and easier to run a full node so hopefully there will be many more available that the sites and services can use if one of them goes down.
Okay, thanks a lot for the reply, apparently it is not that easy to find somebody who knows what happened with that let's call it downtime of steemit.com.
So the apps that are connecting to the Steemit RPC node could somehow check if this node is down and switch to another one during the downtime? Is that possible or I am talking nonsense?
It would be up to the individual application developers to support that. It is possible though, and would be a smart way to design a more fault-tolerant app.
Couldn't have said it better myself @yabapmatt