Comment by senfiaj
8 hours ago
> It’s a single point of failure for the internet. Every Cloudflare outage ends up in the news.
I hear this argument all the time, but I think it's more complicated.
Firstly, if people used more diverse / smaller services the distribution of outages would change. While there will likely to be more frequent "smaller" asynchronous outages, many platforms can still break even when only one of their dependencies break. So, you might likely to face even more frequent outages, although not synchronous.
Secondly, we are not sure if these smaller services are on par with the reliability of Cloudflare and other big players.
Thirdly, not all Cloudflare infrastructure is fully centralized. There is definitely some degree of distribution and independence in/between different Cloudflare services. Some Cloudflare outages can still be non global (limited by region or customers that use certain feature set, etc).
Using a single provider is a single point of failure. It may be that this provider has lots of internal failure modes, but you're still one credit card problem or fake legal request or one mistake away from experiencing the primary failure.
If you actually care for the resiliency necessary to survive a provider outage you should have more than one provider.
Which means you should be running your own origin and using the simplest CDN features you possibly can to make your use case work.
[dead]