If cloudflare goes down, you can blame them. If your hand rolled solution fails when cloudflare exists, you’re going to have a tough pitch to leadership why you’re in charge of the technical roadmap. Choose your battles, and this is not a hill worth dying on.
Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
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Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#42You 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…
The movie doesn't do the book justice. In the book Nedry leads an on-shore team of developers, implied to be high-end competence based in Cambridge. The reason he is the only one on-site is because InGen don't want knowledge about the dinosaurs to leak before they launch the park, so the team basically develops from false or deficient premises and Nedry is the one who can compensate for this.
Nedry is a contractor and presumably reasonably payed, but the job would be awful regardless of how much money he'd make. He's alone, the rest of the on-site employees regard his technical wizardry with deep suspicion and his work habits with disgust. His boss, Hammond, can't stop himself from interfering. Dodgson gives him a way out, in the form of a large cash payment at an airport.
In the book Hammond is a truly ruthless businessman and it makes quite decent satire of the character. When he says things like 'no expense spared' or 'I like kids' it's more like it's coming from an Elon Musk on a stim bender than the warm and aloof Hammond of the movie. In the book, when Hammond comes under pressure he reacts with rage, like when they've realised that Nedry is gone and that Arnold will have to go through the source code himself. At that point Hammond is screaming expletives at his employees, who calmly respond that he instead should go to the cafeteria and get a coffee.
It should also be added that according to the book the reason the park fails is not because it has a single point of failure, but that it is a complex system and inherently uncontrollable. To some extent this shows in the Malcolm character in the movie as well but they do very little with this except having him deliver a few one-liners and the chaos talk with the water drops early on.
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#43Instead 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…
Many (most) companies don’t even manage to split their application across multiple cloud regions with the same provider. Doing it across providers is an order of magnitude harder.
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#44Meh. This opinion highlights the fact that availability is the least understood pillar in security. The Right Way to Think About It is having good security analysis and doing proper Risk Management. This means it is their job to do business impact analysis, 3rd party assessments, and run tabletop exercises on all your critical systems to tell you what is rock solid and what is a house of cards.
How you approach this is very different depending on the size of organization. We're a small shop (3), but we deliver big services to lots of people. We do this by owning everything we can, and using simple vendors for what we can't.
Depends on what your goal is -- minimal downtime or minimal blame
A 5 hour outage when headlines say "the internet is broken" may well be preferable to a 5 minute outage related to your far simpler and far more resilient setup
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#45What 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.
I learned that with crowdstrike. It completely changed my understanding of what's important for C-Suite and C-Suite wannabes that want to be in middle management
Re: Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
#46What 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
I've been involved in public outages (i.e. major newspapers wrote articles about it) on one more than one occasion due to an outage, one was nearly 5 minutes long, the other only 20 seconds, both were terrible.