Comment by graemep
3 months ago
Either you are wrong and they do not have the capacity to do that, or they have decided it is acceptable to be down because a major provider is down
I imagine a cache layer cannot be that easy to spin up - otherwise why would they outsource it?
You outsource it because clouflare have more locations than you so offer lower latency and can offer it at a cost that's cheaper or the same price as doing it yourself.
Which suggests its expensive enough for it to be unlikely they just have the capacity lying around to spin up.
To the contrary, CDN pricing will usually beat cloud provider egress fees.
Common example: you can absolutely serve static content from an S3 bucket worldwide without using a CDN. It will usually scale OK under load. However, you're going to pay more for egress and give your customers a worse experience. Capacity isn't the problem you're engineering around.
For a site serving content at scale, a CDN is purpose-built to get content around the world efficiently. This is usually cheaper and faster than trying to do it yourself.
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