Netlify was down | Hacker News Reader

Netlify was down

netlifystatus.com

67 pointsminikomi33 comments

I spent about 10 minutes trying to work out why `netlify dev` was hanging on my local machine, thinking I'd accidentally nerfed something in npm, before I tried to check the docs and discovered they were down. I forgot that `netlify dev` even needed an internet connection.

Not sure how I feel about this "connected local development" concept at the moment...

i think the connection's for getting the environment vars from netlify

It also does some magic with node modules in lambda functions, so that you can import them without packaging them locally. Any functions using that...I don't know what to call it, module proxy I guess...break in offline mode.

>Investigating - We are currently investigating outages and latencies from our origin server.

This seems strange. Is the netlify origin hosted in a single region or something?

If Netlify is completely static I could see there being a single server being the master copy and every edge server being just a caching proxy in front of that.

maybe authentication goes through 1 region?

is this related with Level3/CenturyLink/Lumen outages two weeks ago

How do you imagine that to be possible?

I think this was meant to be satire.

I get triggered when I hear Level3

I understand it's nice to have easy CI/CD with a simple git push to your repo. But there is something to be said for roll your own hosting IMHO.

When I rolled my own hosting, not only did it go down more frequently than Netlify, but I was on the hook for fixing it. I'm glad to let rolling my own hosting on static sites die.

I'd like to clarify a little... With hosting your own, I don't necessarily mean running your own physical server, although that is surely possible. Heck some people run their blog on their raspberry pi. Netlify is a pretty great service. But if your use case is merely a simple static website, and nothing fancy. Your hosting doesn't need to be either.

Merely pointing out having websites distributed, and not freely at one huge vendor leaves me thinking I'm glad I don't put all my eggs in the same basket.

Sure, you could easily use Github Actions paired with an s3 bucket if all you're doing is CI/CD to push to static hosting. That said, Netlify does offer value adds beyond just production hosting.

disclosure: I work as Sysops, so I might be more inclined to running it myself.

But there is something to be said for roll your own hosting IMHO.

In my experience sites go down far more often when I'm in charge of the hosting.

And also considering that Netlify is marketed towards beginners just dipping their toes into web development as well as industry professionals, is it really a good idea to encourage beginners to roll their own anything in any conditions other than training exercises? We already tried this experiment with cPanel in the early 2000s; so many sites got pwned due to bad configurations and injection-prone PHP that we spawned entire industries and standards boards to deal with that problem. From a cybersecurity perspective it makes no sense to give beginners this responsibility and from a general productivity standpoint it makes no sense to ask beginners to become sysadmins + DBAs + SREs before they can get a single page up.

I should add, this does not mean we shouldn't encourage beginners to explore all of these fields, but it should be done in training conditions (i.e. I don't care if this gets pwned) rather than for any serious application. That way there is no risk in messing up.

Thanks for your insightfull comments, indeed running your own hosting is a special skill, which some people like to explore, and I guess quite a lot don't. Having broken cPanels around isn't a very good scenario indeed.

Rolling your own hosting is prohibitively expensive for most but the largest companies. Most instead will opt for running their infrastructure on a cloud provider, which perhaps gives you more control over things, but you will succumb to some of the same downtime Netlify and the like will experience.

Huh? Cloudflare is free so all you need for a static site is a $5 VPS.

That's not rolling your own; that's depending on 2 cloud providers. (the comment was clarified to not mean actual infrastructure, but still, you've really only shifted dependencies in almost every case)

It is in this context. The first step in moving away from something like Netlify is to have your own server with a free CDN backing it. After that I guess you can buy your own hardware and internet connection. But nobody here is suggesting we all create our own CDNs.

There is something to be said about letting experts do what they do best.

It’s not that: a single expert is still a single point of failure. Everyone goes down, it’s all just shades of gray.

The sad thing here is that front end (or stateless for that matter) is actually fairly easy to run across two CDNs

Doing it yourself qualifies as "a single expert is still a single point of failure". A single vendor at least has some levels of staffing and redundancy that I nor my company can match.

I’m not suggesting doing it yourself...I’m suggesting the exact opposite. What I am advocating for is redundancy.

But thanks for playing.

Do you really need to spend the time (and maybe money) for a second host just because your current one might go down for an hour? There's probably a point at which you might rightly consider it, but I doubt many people are legitimately at that threshold. Especially given I don't even remember the last time Netlify had this issue.

When did I ever say most people have this issue? Of course most don’t. But there are many that do: an hour of lost sales a few times a year can easily justify the very easy efforts of running two CDNs. You’re vastly overestimating the cost (human and financial).

In my business, being down for an hour would be a very big deal.

The total downtime was less than an hour and a half. Many spend more time each day on HN.

If there is an way to plug and play a netlify / heroku deployment flow on my own server I would. I'm a developer to build websites, not a sys admin or dev ops.

I'm working on this as an open source project for the last couple of weeks.

https://github.com/greehost has most of the code, it's hosting http://greehost.org/en/design/components/ currently.

I'm working on the user panel now, but most of the "Run a builder of some sort, move assets to locations to serve" for static stuff is done; containers for application hosting itself hasn't been started yet.

You may want to see dokku: https://github.com/dokku/dokku

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