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Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#22> Here’s the thing, if your core business function depends on some capability, you should own it if at all possible.
If I'm building something that allows my customers to do X, then yes I will own the software that allows my customers to do X. Makes sense.
> They’ll craft artisanal monitoring solutions while their actual business logic—the thing customers pay for—runs on someone else’s computer.
So instead I should build an artisanal hosting solution on my own hardware that I purchase and maintain? I could drop proxmox on them and go from there, or K8s, or even just bare metal and systemd scripts.
But my business isn't about any of those things, its about X. How does owning and running my own hardware get me closer to delivering on X?
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#23You 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…
> 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
Even if they did "spare no expense" they could have wound up in the same situation. I see this a lot, "it would be better if only we spent more money" but the only thing casually related to increasing expense is increased withdrawals from the bank account. Spending more money doesn't guarantee a better outcome see US public schools for example.
edit: coming back to this. Was the Cloudflare outage really caused by reading a file that was over 200 lines when the process can only handle a max of 200? That's a good example, I'm sure Cloudflare spared no expense in that part of their infrastructure yet here they are (or were).
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#24There'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.
> 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.
that's at the root of all infrastructure decisions, not just web app tech stacks but even something like utility service. I think it gets lost on a lot of technology people because we love to work on big technical things. No one wants a boring answer like a couple webservers and postgres with a backup in a different datacenter when there's a wall of knobs and switches to play with at the hyperscalers.
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#25For data analysis and medium-sized ML jobs, my personal computer is so much faster and more responsive than any cloud solution. Of course you get none of the resiliency or security guarantees of the cloud, but it’s a data point. I genuinely hate using cloud and avoid using it if at all possible. Even a MacBook Pro is faster.
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#26The advice here is contradictory. It suggests you should build and own things your business depends on, wherever possible, but also that you should buy things that aren't a core value of your core business.
There would very typically be a large overlap here.
Probably very few companies should build and run their own CDN and internet scale firewall, for example. Doesn't have to be cloudflare, but there aren't any providers that will have zero outages (a homegrown one is likely to be orders of magnitude worse and more expensive).
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#27Wardley Mapping is a framework for better understanding Build v Buy (v Rent) at a more strategic level. tldr - it's much more nuanced than 'if you depend on it own it'
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#28You 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…
Your customers are also likely down if they run online services
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#29You 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…
Yea agreed. I don't build my own CDNs.
But I don't choose cloudflare either, because its too complicated and I don't need that. So I choose the simplest possible thing with as little complexity as possible (for me, that was BunnyCDN). If it goes down, its usually obviously why. And I didn't rely on anything special about it, so I can move away painlessly.
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 Even if they did "spare no expense" they could have wound up in the same situation. I see this a lot, "it would be better if only we spent more money" but the only thing casually related to increasing expense is increased withdrawals fr…
> I'm sure Cloudflare spared no expense in that part of their infrastructure yet here they are
Almost everyone developing software spares some expense. It's maybe the main argument you can make for why it's engineering vs not. It's a cost-benefit tradeoff.
Cloudflare isn't doing e.g. super expensive formally verified software up and down its whole stack, practically nobody does that.