"The internet will just route around a local / centralised problem ... like water around an object" Obligatory LOL ...
Nobody said how quickly, to be fair
Fastly Outage
591–600 of 740 posts
Re: Fastly Outage
#592Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, with SO, at least you can search on Google and view the version cached by Google just fine. With Reddit however, these days almost all comments are locked behind “view entire discussion” or “continue this thread”. In fact, just now I searched for something for which the most relevant discussion was on Reddit; Reddit was down so I opened the cached version, and was literally greeted by five “continue this thread…
Yeah it's crazy how bad user-hostile reddit.com has become. Fortunately old.reddit.com is still available, but for how long? If only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad.
> only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad.
Arrange the html so that the list of comments is at the end (via css). Keep the http connection open, have the show more button send some of request, and when you receive that request send the rest of the page over the original http connection.
As usual, solve people problems via people, not tech.
Re: Fastly Outage
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear that you're suggesting that those involved shouldnt feel bad because its a systemic / just a job / etc. But the reality is that incidents like this can be very traumatic for those involved and thats not something they can control. If it was that simple to manage, depression and anxiety would not be a thing. Think its best to show a large amount of support and empathy for the individuals having a really bad day…
I don't see how it's so traumatic for the engineers involved, unless the company culture in Fastly is really awful and there are punitive repercussions, or attempts to pin responsbility on individuals rather than systems, which I doubt. Many here have been responsible for web service outages albeit on much smaller scales, and in my experience it feels awful while it's happening but you quickly forget about it because…
I guess it very much depends on your personality. I screwed up a a not very important project for a client 4 years ago while working at a different company, and I still feel bad when I think about it, despite the fact that my company had my back through the entire process and literally everybody involved has moved on and probably forgotten about it.
Re: Fastly Outage
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this a call for competition? I regard Cloudflare as state-of-the-art in terms of security and ease-of-use. I certainly hope their knowledge replicates across other organizations. As of now they're still building highly impactful tools that are easy to use and that noone else quite provides. I don't really expect another organization to match them given the strength of their current leadership. I think they've buil…
They have also been responsible for one the worst security incidents ever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752 Only discovered we should not forget,due to the good graces of google project zero. A certain those of skepticism towards any technical offer out there would be advised.
I like Cloudflare's post mortems, and I like how they fight back against patent trolls. For me as a dev they are #1.
Re: Fastly Outage
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same reason why Gmail uses their own emojis rather than the system ones — (as said above) branding. When you send a tweet, Twitter wants it to look identical across all devices. The classic native UI vs cross-platform UI debate in a nutshell.
Cool, so instead of actually serving text, they could also just serve up little SVGs for each letter. Because god forbid the recipient chooses a different font than Gmail!
You're pretty much defining webfonts!
Re: Fastly Outage
#596Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now imagine how many sites would go down if it was CF
Is this a call for competition? I regard Cloudflare as state-of-the-art in terms of security and ease-of-use. I certainly hope their knowledge replicates across other organizations. As of now they're still building highly impactful tools that are easy to use and that noone else quite provides. I don't really expect another organization to match them given the strength of their current leadership. I think they've buil…
> Cloudflare as state-of-the-art in terms of security and ease-of-use
Depends whose security. I value my security dearly and that's why i use the Tor Browser. Cloudflare has decided i cannot browse any of their websites if i care about my security (they filter out tor users and archiving bots agressively) so i'm not using any cloudflare-powered website. Is it good for security that we prevent people from using security-oriented tooling, and let a single multinational corporation decide who gets to enter a website or not? In my book creating a SPOF is already bad practice, but having them filter out entrances is even worse.
Also, are all of these CDNs and other cloud providers are solving the right problems?
If you want your service to be resilient against DDOS attacks, you don't need such huge infrastructure. I've seen WP site operators move to Cloudflare because they had no caching in place, let alone a static site.
If you want better connectivity in remote places where our optic fiber overlords haven't invested yet, P2P technology has much better guarantees than a CDN (content-addressing, no SPOF). IPFS/dat/Freenet/Bittorrent... even multicast can be used for spreading content far and wide.
Why do sysadmins want/use CDNs? Can't we find better solutions? Solutions that are more respectful to spiders and privacy-minding folks with NoScript and/or Tor Browser?
Re: Fastly Outage
#597Tangential question, but with services like these, is there a known way to handle failure gracefully? Some way to automatically bypass these services if they are known to be down?
You have to have two separate cdns and use DNS to fail over. The problem is that means paying for a CDN that just sits dormant for the 99.999% of the time that your primary is down.
Alternatively you could use DNS to fail over to the content you host, instead of another CDN. But in many cases that would be the same as an outage since the CDN exists to reduce the impact of all those requests on your infra
Re: Fastly Outage
#598Re: Fastly Outage
#599Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah it's crazy how bad user-hostile reddit.com has become. Fortunately old.reddit.com is still available, but for how long? If only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad.
> only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad. Arrange the html so that the list of comments is at the end (via css). Keep the http connection open, have the show more button send some of request, and when you receive that request send the rest of the page over the original http connection. As usual, solve people problems via people, not tech.
Well technically everything is possible. But Javascript was precisely designed to encourage this kind of patterns.
> As usual, solve people problems via people, not tech.
So true..
Re: Fastly Outage
#600What conclusions can we draw about concentrating web content in a few CDNs?
In HTML/CSS you should be able to specify a fallback source if the first returns a non-200. Or that companies need to have better DNS strategies.
DNS didn't fail, and there's nothing you can do in HTML/CS/JS if your CDN fails to serve those things