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Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube had outage issues

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Re: Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube had outage issues

#23
post #3

Our site was using hosted libraries, google fonts, and google analytics. All of which seemed to be behind captchas, throwing CORS errors, and 503ing since this morning. Swapped out JQuery cdn for now.

Is there a good reason to use these things hosted by a third party source? Libraries are tiny, the fonts can be downloaded from Google Fonts and embedded locally, etc. Even the Google Analytics JS script I presume can be stored and run local. Shouldn't a goal be to mitigate the number of possible failures which can bring down your site by reducing the number of single points of failure?

Our GA is setup through GTM now, that is why it's not hardcoded into our head. Really the most important gain we get from hosted libraries is caching. Since any user that has hit a google hosted lib, which is pretty widely used and distributed it allows them to access their cached version instead of sending our another request.

Re: Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube had outage issues

#25
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a good reason to use these things hosted by a third party source? Libraries are tiny, the fonts can be downloaded from Google Fonts and embedded locally, etc. Even the Google Analytics JS script I presume can be stored and run local. Shouldn't a goal be to mitigate the number of possible failures which can bring down your site by reducing the number of single points of failure?

One reason is that by linking to external libraries your browser most likely has them cached. At least it was the case a few years ago when I was doing web dev.

I see this argument a lot but I don't think it's necessarily a good one. If a third party CDN goes down, your site is down.

A few extra ms in initial download isn't so bad compared to having your site be completely inaccessible for reasons outside your control.

Re: Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube had outage issues

#27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a good reason to use these things hosted by a third party source? Libraries are tiny, the fonts can be downloaded from Google Fonts and embedded locally, etc. Even the Google Analytics JS script I presume can be stored and run local. Shouldn't a goal be to mitigate the number of possible failures which can bring down your site by reducing the number of single points of failure?

One reason is that by linking to external libraries your browser most likely has them cached. At least it was the case a few years ago when I was doing web dev.

This is most likely never the case, because there are way too many versions of each library.

Re: Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube had outage issues

#28
post #3

Our site was using hosted libraries, google fonts, and google analytics. All of which seemed to be behind captchas, throwing CORS errors, and 503ing since this morning. Swapped out JQuery cdn for now.

Is there a good reason to use these things hosted by a third party source? Libraries are tiny, the fonts can be downloaded from Google Fonts and embedded locally, etc. Even the Google Analytics JS script I presume can be stored and run local. Shouldn't a goal be to mitigate the number of possible failures which can bring down your site by reducing the number of single points of failure?

Yes, Google can change the logic for auth, analytics, etc at any time and your local outdated copy will be useless, further I believe it's possible that Google returns different JS depending on the browser that's requesting it in order to keep payloads down and performance high.
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