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Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You

toddhgardner.com

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Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You

#11

Post by onion2k »

You can't build your own Cloudflare in any meaningful sense. You can choose not to have the functionality Cloudflare provides because you prioritize the risk of a Cloudflare outage as more important than the benefits Cloudflare gives you, but that probability tree is probably going to land in Cloudflare's favor for 99.99% of businesses.

If you can build a system with redundancy to continue working even if Cloudflare is unavailable then you should, but most years that's going to be a waste of time.

I think you'd be better off spending the time building good relationships with your customers and users so that in the event of an outage that's beyond your control they trust your business and continue to be happy customers when you're back up and running.

Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You

#12

Post by vivzkestrel »

Instead we need a startup that builds over every cloud provider. Think of a web server for example. AWS has EC2, GCP has its own equivalent and Azure has its own and so on. What if we had a startup that virtualizes a layer on top of these such that we AWS has an outage, you lose 1/3rd of your operating capacity, when Azure has an outage you lose 1/3rd of your operating capacity. In order for you startup s virtual webserver to go down, all of AWS, GCP and Azure wil have to go down simultaneously. Basically build on top of everyone s cloud service into one single unified virtual layer that offers end products to consumers. A 6GB RAM server that the end consumer purchases has 2GB of RAM running on AWS, 2GB on Azure and 2GB on GCP. I am sure we can also strategize something along the same lines for a database server with the added question of the database sharding strategy at play

Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You

#14

Post by joshgachnang »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #12

Instead we need a startup that builds over every cloud provider. Think of a web server for example. AWS has EC2, GCP has its own equivalent and Azure has its own and so on. What if we had a startup that virtualizes a layer on top of these such that we AWS has an outage, you lose 1/3rd of your operating capacity, when Azure has an outage you lose 1/3rd of your operating capacity. In order for you startup s virtual web…

It's great in theory, it's just relatively expensive. You'll need to pay to be running on all the clouds plus keeping extra traffic to keep databases synced. Distributed systems are hard.

Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You

#15

Post by bradly »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #12

Instead we need a startup that builds over every cloud provider. Think of a web server for example. AWS has EC2, GCP has its own equivalent and Azure has its own and so on. What if we had a startup that virtualizes a layer on top of these such that we AWS has an outage, you lose 1/3rd of your operating capacity, when Azure has an outage you lose 1/3rd of your operating capacity. In order for you startup s virtual web…

This is what Fog and other cloud agnostic libraries promise. The problem is they you get tied to the lowest common feature set or writing different code paths to take advantage of latest features.

Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You

#16

Post by skeezyjefferson »

mannyv wrote: post #13

What this outage teaches you is that when a third party vendor fails and the internet breaks you can point the finger at them with no issues. If your shit breaks and everyone else's shit is still working that's a problem.

> you can point the finger at them with no issues.

yeah sure, if your business is one of the 500 startups on HN creating inane shit like a notes app or a calendar, but outages can affect genuine companies that people rely on

Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You

#17

Post by juancn »

There's no easy answer, but you should definitely model what happens when X goes down if you depend on X.

It may even be a rational decision to take the downtime if the cost of avoiding it exceeds the expected cost of an eventual downtime, but that's a business decision that requires some serious thought.

Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You

#18

Post by mrweasel »

onion2k wrote: post #11

You can't build your own Cloudflare in any meaningful sense. You can choose not to have the functionality Cloudflare provides because you prioritize the risk of a Cloudflare outage as more important than the benefits Cloudflare gives you, but that probability tree is probably going to land in Cloudflare's favor for 99.99% of businesses. If you can build a system with redundancy to continue working even if Cloudflare…

Exactly, CloudFlare falls squarely in the "Buy" category. This is not a product you just build, you'd overpay massively for global capacity.

In general I think people are overreaction to the CloudFlare outage and most of these types of articles aren't really thought all the way through.

Also the conclusion on Jurassic Park is wrong. Hammond "spared no expense" yet Nedry was a single point of failure? Seems like they spared at least some expense in the IT department

Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You

#19

Post by dlisboa »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #12

Instead we need a startup that builds over every cloud provider. Think of a web server for example. AWS has EC2, GCP has its own equivalent and Azure has its own and so on. What if we had a startup that virtualizes a layer on top of these such that we AWS has an outage, you lose 1/3rd of your operating capacity, when Azure has an outage you lose 1/3rd of your operating capacity. In order for you startup s virtual web…

> A 6GB RAM server that the end consumer purchases has 2GB of RAM running on AWS, 2GB on Azure and 2GB on GCP.

That'd be very inefficient usage of compute. Memory access now has network latency, cache locality doesn't exist, processes don't work. You're basically subverting how computers fundamentally work today. There's no benefit.

I know Kubernetes and containers has everyone thinking servers don't matter but we should have less virtualization, not more. Redundancy and virtualization are not the same thing.

Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You

#20

Post by renewiltord »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #12

Instead we need a startup that builds over every cloud provider. Think of a web server for example. AWS has EC2, GCP has its own equivalent and Azure has its own and so on. What if we had a startup that virtualizes a layer on top of these such that we AWS has an outage, you lose 1/3rd of your operating capacity, when Azure has an outage you lose 1/3rd of your operating capacity. In order for you startup s virtual web…

In practice, you're better off just having one cloud but if you ever reach the point you care about this, you're better off running some cloud-agnostic platform like Kubernetes in a multi-cloud setup (i.e. one cluster per cloud) and then load-balancing or failing over via DNS.
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