Comment by captainkrtek
5 days ago
> It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't.
I agree wholeheartedly. The only change is internal to these organizations (eg: CloudFlare, AWS) Improvements will be made to the relevant systems, and some teams internally will also audit for similar behavior, add tests, and fix some bugs.
However, nothing external will change. The cycle of pretending like you are going to implement multi-region fades after a week. And each company goes on continuing to leverage all these services to the Nth degree, waiting for the next outage.
Not advocating that organizations should/could do much, it's all pros/cons. But the collective blast radius is still impressive.
the root cause is customers refusing to punish these downtime.
Checkout how hard customers punish blackouts from the grid - both via wallet, but also via voting/gov't. It's why they are now more reliable.
So unless the backbone infrastructure gets the same flak, nothing is going to change. After all, any change is expensive, and the cost of that change needs to be worth it.
Is a little downtime such a bad thing? Trying to avoid some bumps and bruises in your business has diminishing returns.
Even more so when most of the internet is also down.
What are customers going to do? Go to competitor that's also down?
It is extremely annoying, will ruin your day, but as movie quote goes - if everyone is special, no one is.
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What's "a little downtime" to you might be work ruined and day wasted for someone else.
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Depends on the business.
> the root cause is customers refusing to punish these downtime.
ok how do I punish cloudflare -- build my own globally-distributed content-delivery network just for myself so that I can be "decentralized"?
Or should I go to one of their even-larger competitors like AWS or GCP?
What exactly do you propose?
Why not just boycott CDNs like Cloudflare and instead host your website on a decentralized network like Bluesky (https://danielmangum.com/posts/this-website-is-hosted-on-blu...) or IPFS (https://pinme.eth.limo/) for free?
you are not a customer of cloudflare.
You need to be punishing the services you "paid" to use, but had downtime. So did you terminate any of those services for downtime, or had any sort of punishment done to them as a result?
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Grid reliability depends on where you live. In some places, UPS or even a generator is a must have. So it's a bad example, I would say.
> Checkout how hard customers punish blackouts from the grid - both via wallet, but also via voting/gov't.
What? Since when has anyone ever been free to just up and stop paying for power from the grid? Are you going to pay $10,000 - $100,000 to have another power company install lines? Do you even have another power company in the area? State? Country? Do you even have permission for that to happen near your building? Any building?
The same is true for internet service, although personally I'd gladly pay $10,000 - $100,000 to have literally anything else at my location, but there are no proper other wired providers and I'll die before I ever install any sort of cellular router. Also this is a rented apartment so I'm fucked even if there were competition, although I plan to buy a house in a year or two.
The hyperscalers definitely vote with their wallets.
Downtimes happen one way or another. The upside of using Cloudflare is that bringing things back online is their problem and not mine like when I self-host. :]
Their infrastructure went down for a pretty good reason (let the one who has never caused that kind of error cast the first stone) and was brought back within a reasonable time.
And even in multi-region, you experience a DNS failure and it all goes up in flames anyway. There's always going to be something.