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Comment by wafflerewire | Hacker News Reader

My enterprise sized day job is an Akamai customer. Nothing in China directly so we won't be directly impacted.

As a hypothetical, if we got told that we had to switch providers to stay in a region, we'd need to rebuild pipelines, EdgeWorkers, edge caching rules, origin routing configurations and probably more I'm not aware of. Plus testing all of those changes in a non-breaking way across the entire enterprise. Along with all the normal business delivery priorities.

It'd probably take a solid year for us to fully execute it.

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This. People tend not to realize how sprawling enterprise software stacks tend to be, how many implicit dependencies have to be untangled, etc. Even simple things can take years and complicated things often just don’t get done at all.

Yes, dealing with the mess that is your software stack, the mess that is your corporate structure, and the mess that is your change management process means that things a couple dudes in your startup could accomplish in a week would take a year at a crusty enterprise.

There's also a finance process. Akamai deals mostly with enterprise customers, which means step 1 may be technical validation, but step 2 is negotiating an appropriate contract with another provider, which may take weeks on its own without a clear go/no-go answer in the meantime.

Sounds fragile and pretty exposed.

(Also a complete layman here)

I don't think it's particularly fragile. Big systems have big dependencies, and moving those dependencies takes time if you want to minimise risk.

It's actually the opposite. I thought the same thing before working in big enterprise though so I definitely understand how you could think that.

In reality everything takes 10x longer because things are done in a very thorough way and typically with significant redundancy (high availability). The code bases are typically shite and personally I'd rather eat nails than work on them, but they are reasonably well tested and changes are typically done very conservatively. Big enterprise devs are also really good at not breaking production. As much as I detest that environment, I do think startups in general could learn a great deal about not breaking production from the big enterprise people.

What I meant to be dependent on a single essential service that much with that much difficulty to overcome. Smells like lots of trust and hope (of things will stay as they are for long) put into the architecture. It is nice there is a workaround, and there is a will for workaround, in this situation for instance.

No, quite the opposite. Big companies likely also have other big(ger) companies as partners/customers, all of which want stableness and see things keep working. Therefore companies need careful planning, execution and testing to ensure there is minimal disruption.

Startups and a certain company can move fast and break things. But not everyone can do this.

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