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Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

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Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#161

Post by mylons »

falcor84 wrote: post #84
mylons wrote: post #55

This is GOLD Jerry, Gold. but who detects the down detector detecting the down detector detecting the down detector

I know you were joking, but responding in seriousness - while in general it's worthwhile asking "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", in this particular case, I don't see any issue with Down Detector detecting the Down Detector Down Detector. Assuming they are in different availability zones, using different code, with a different deployment cadence, this approach works quite well in practice.

haha — this is the exact comment i was hoping to see! indeed, i was joking. The Watchmen graphic novel is very important to me as it opened my eyes to the concept of “who watches the watchmen” which I was ultimately eluding to here, albeit extremely facetiously.

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#162

Post by mylons »

falcor84 wrote: post #99
Waterluvian wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? Arbites.

"To serve the Emperor. To protect His domains. To judge and stand guard over His subjects. To carry the Emperor's law to all worlds under His blessed protection. To pursue and punish those who trespassed against His word."

i love you guys.

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#163

Post by nonethewiser »

monooso wrote: post #119
nonethewiser wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS and Cloudflare don't actually experience more downtime, it's just a bigger story when they are down because so many people use them. You can use whatever infrastructure you want for whatever reason, but you may not have an accurate picture of the availability.

> AWS and Cloudflare don't actually experience more downtime, it's just a bigger story when they are down because so many people use them. This may be true over a long enough timeframe, but GP stated that their clients had experienced no downtime since switching at the start of the year. That is clearly better than both AWS and Cloudflare during that time.

>GP stated that their clients had experienced no downtime since switching at the start of the year

That's the least useful information.

What matters for his service availability is what he should expect going forward. What matters for reviewing his decision making process is what he should have expected at the time of choosing service providers.

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#164

Post by yfw »

KK7NIL wrote: post #142
pksebben wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is this weird thing that happens with hyperscale - the combination of highly central decision-making, extreme interconnection / interdependence of parts, and the attractiveness of lots of money all conspire to create a system pulled by unstable attractors to a fracturing point (slowed / mitigated at least a little by the inertia of such a large ship). Are smaller scale services more reliable? I think that's too…

Have you considered that a widespread outage is a feature, not a bug? If AWS goes down, no one will blame you for your web store being down as pretty much every other online service will be seeing major disruptions. But when your super small provider goes down, it's now your problem and you better have some answers ready for your manager. And you'll still be affected by the AWS outage anyways as you probably rely on…

Depends on your customers understanding that. We had a gym with 'smart' pilates machines that went down. Hard to explain to them the cloud is involved

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#165

Post by nonethewiser »

monooso wrote: post #144
count wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My clients (extremely large) AWS based infrastructure experienced no downtime this year. So, if it's based on some random person's clients, it's not clearly better at all. I don't use cloud flare for anything, so no comment there.

> So, if it's based on some random person's clients, it's not clearly better at all. Valid. I should have made it clear that I meant "clearly better from GP's perspective."

Clearly better than what though?

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#166

Post by NetMageSCW »

Krutonium wrote: post #51
graemep wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all much smaller. Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not. In a corporate settings management will say "this would not have happened if you had gone with AWS". its the current version of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (we had MS and others in between). Hetzner provides a much simpler set of services than AWS. Less complexity to go…

>I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service. That's an incredibly bad take lol. There are times where "The Cloud" makes sense, sure. But in my experience the majority of the time companies over-use the cloud. On Prem is GOOD. It's cheaper, arguably more secure if you configure it right (a challenge, I know, but hear me out) and gives you data s…

Configuring something on premises to match the capabilities of AWS or Azure or CloudFlare is very, very difficult and involves a lot of local money and expertise that often isn’t available at any affordable price.

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#167

Post by itake »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #149
mbesto wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not. Hard disagree. A smaller provider will think twice about whether they use a Tier 1 data center versus a Tier IV data center because the cost difference is substantial and in many cases prohibitively expensive.

This. There's a fundamental logic error here. You simply don't hear about downtimes at smaller providers that often because it doesn't affect a significant portion of the internet like it does e.g. for AWS. But that doesn't mean they are more stable in general.

yeah, I'd like to see hard data on uptimes / reliability between these 2 services before declaring that big = bad and small = good.

FlyIO (and Digital Ocean) had horrible up-time when they first got started. In the last 6-12 months, FlyIO been much better. But they would go down all the time or have unexpected CI bugs/changes.

Digital Ocean accidentally hard deleted user's object stores before their IPO.

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