I disagree. I learnt good stuff from this article and it’s enough.
That's perfectly fine. It's also besides the point though. You can learn without reading random people online cynically shit talking others as a self promotion strategy. This is junior dev energy manifesting junior level understanding of the whole problem domain.
There's not a lot to learn from claims that boil down to "don't have bugs".
Somebody has to write something in the first place for one to learn from it, even if the writing is disagreeable.
The comment is:
> You can learn without reading random people online cynically shit talking others as a self promotion strategy.
Edit: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48989-6_...
What did you mean by this then? There certainly seems to be nothing special about consensus that makes it any harder to verify than anything else. It's not fundamentally impossible to verify the software that CERN uses, it just takes some work.
For life or death systems, I agree that we should be looking to implement analogous processes/systems to a structural engineer or doctor, etc. Cloudflare is not a life or death system. If you operate a life or death system and you have Cloudflare as a single point of failure, for some reason, that should not be Cloudflare's problem.
I would not be surprised if the answer is "several". The average impact per human is obviously pretty small, but across billions of humans, there will be outliers.
Maybe a fire department uses a coordination system that relies on cloudflare, and with cloudflare down they have to resort to their backup system, and their backup system works but is slightly worse and causes one engine to be delayed in their response, and because they're 3 minutes late, they just miss being able to save someone from the fire.
Maybe someone's running a scientific study on nutrition, and the cloudflare outage means their data collection system is goes down for a bit, so their data flawed, and they end up just barely not passing a some necessary threshold, and they have to rerun their study, and that takes an extra week, and then they miss that quarter's deadline, and then the resulting adjustment to a product/procedure is delayed, and that 3 month delay causes 100,000 people to be slightly more malnourished than they would be otherwise, and one of those people ends up just barely too unhealthy to survive an unrelated deadly illness.
Sure, these scenarios are far-fetched. The chance of if it happening is one-in-a-million.
There are 10000 one-in-a-million people on the earth.
(More seriously, 'formal verification' is not a single thing, more a class of techniques which allow you to statically guarantee some properties of the system you are working with. When you propose it, you should have a clear idea of what properties you care about and how you intend to prove them, as well as a strong concern about whether those properties are actually going to capture enough of what you care about for it to be worthwhile)
Not really. The article is a textbook example of hindsight bias. It's a simplistic analysis of a far more complex problem that goes over the blogger's head, and results in a string of simplistic assertions that fail to address any of the issues. Read up on the definition of monday morning quarterback.