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Comment by bszupnick | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I didn't notice the domain name, and I actually thought the author was being quite understanding by saying things like "This is inevitable and unavoidable and entirely excusable. Everybody blows up, every DNS provider in existence will experience downtime. No exceptions." and that they use Cloudflare themselves.

This is obviously subjective, but to me it didn't come across as "they suck use us" but rather pointing out the inherent flaws in this quite popular SPOF and cautioning to avoid it.

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I think the root cause (which, IMO, you correctly point out) is lost on many modern developers.

For whatever reason there's this modern idea that if a company A is paying money to company B for a service, that company B will handle all the 'hard stuff' for them.

The end result is we have a lot of applications/infra built with SPOFs, in some cases known, but in many, swept under the rug and abstracted away to passing the buck in case of a large failure (i.e. major AWS/Cloudflare/Azure outages).

You also see this at times when vendors pitch internal software solutions. I've been at more than one shop where a vendor's 'silver bullet' turned into a SPOF time-bomb because nobody considered this company's solution could fail. After all, the sales presentation said it had %nines%!

"Your app will go down when half the Internet goes down" is not that big of a deal to most software companies, because:

1. no one's going to blame me if my app goes down when half the Internet is also down but they are going to blame me if my custom solution to the same thing causes an outage,

2. there's no way my custom solution is going to achieve the same uptime. AWS/Cloudflare/Azure are not perfect, but whatever I roll for myself is almost certainly going to be much less perfect.

Regarding 2, that’s exactly what the blog post was advocating for: Redundancy. They weren’t saying give up on Cloudflare (as they mentioned, they use it themselves).

They do blame you though, most people won't be aware of the real issue, when cloudflare went down, the trending things on twitter were #spotifydown and #applemusic

I suspect customers complaining on Twitter are not the ones cared about to whoever decides to use Cloudflare.

I build an app. I use CF for my app. Customers use my app. CF has an outage. Customers don't care why I'm down, they care that my app isn't working.

What is your solution for never going down?

the tone may have been moderate, but the message is smug.

otoh it’s just marketing, and CF is no stranger to it, so i think it’s fair.

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