Comment by timenotwasted
5 days ago
"Embrace outages, and build redundancy." — It feels like back in the day this was championed pretty hard especially by places like Netflix (Chaos Monkey) but as downtime has become more expected it seems we are sliding backwards. I have a tendency to rely too much on feelings so I'm sure someone could point me to some data that proves otherwise but for now that's my read on things. Personally, I've been going a lot more in on self-hosting lots of things I used to just mindlessly leave on the cloud.
I have cell phone calls regularly drop during tower handoffs, and codec errors that result in a blast of static upon answering a call. I can't remember a single time I had a phone call fail on the old PSTN built out of DMS10 and DMS100s locally (well, until we lost all trunks due to a fibre issue a couple of weeks ago on November 10th -- the incumbent didn't notice the outage which started at ~3:20am until ~9:30am, and it wasn't fixed until 17:38). One time when I was a teenager in the '90s, a friend and I had a 14 hour call using landlines.
The modern tech stack is disappointing in its lack of reliability. Complexity is the root of all evil.