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Comment by ishi | Hacker News Reader

I assume that in the real world you grow your own food, generate your own electricity, dig up your own wells for water, and knit your own clothes? Companies have to rely on other companies for critical services, just like we do in the real world.

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Multiple sourcing is the key. All of the above products can be bought from multiple places, this API could be "bought" from a single vendor.

Any usage kf SaaS would require a solid contract in place and a plan B (and C, and D, etc) to reach even a fraction the reliability of e.g electricity or food.

Managing risk comes into play here. Would you spend time integrating 2 services, negotiating 2 contacts, supporting 2 providers who may change features and approaches over time, splitting a fraction of traffic to make sure both still work, limiting yourself to common feature set... Or would that cost you more to implement them a few days of (potential) complete downtime.

Choosing the potential downtime is not a failure, if you considered your options.

You have to admit that the Smyte's customer list that's floated around, here, isn't all just some startups that can't afford to research their backups. And maybe they did, actually. Did anyone even hear if Zendesk was even affected by this happening?

Most of this has a latency that's orders of magnitude different. For electricity, those are microseconds (and for anything longer you do have UPS and generators and failover, right?), for the other things, it's days. "Half an hour" is just about the worst timeframe for a deadline.

Own a generator, have a stock pile of food and water, have a well I can run with the generator. Have plenty of clothing that can last many years. It isn't about being able to be self sufficient for forever, but being able to be self sufficient for long enough to weather a disaster (last time hurricane took down power for a few weeks, I only had minor inconveniences and was able to focus on helping others who weren't nearly as well prepared). Yes, it costs money and not all people can afford it, but for businesses, it should be something they do plan for.

Food and clothing aren't services they are once off purchases that you own, these are more like buying the software and self hosting it than SaaS.

Electricity and water are heavily regulated and often government owned, not run by Silicon Valley cowboys.

I don't want to make assumptions about your metabolism, but I find that I actually need to eat food on a fairly regular basis, to the point that I would not characterize it as a "once off" purchase.

If the company I buy food from decides to ghost all their customers with 30 minutes notice, I can walk a block in the opposite direction and buy food from a completely different company. And I can walk a block further and buy food from yet another company. Any of these companies vanishing into thin air would only cost me a 10 minutes of my time at most.

When I need more food I'll make another once off purchase. If the place that had lunch today has boarded up it's windows tomorrow I'll just eat somewhere else. If I bought that food from a supermarket it doesn't disappear from my pantry when the supermarket closes down.

My food supply is a self organising network that can route around any single point of failure. This is about as far removed from SaaS as you can get.

> Electricity and water are heavily regulated and often government owned, not run by Silicon Valley cowboys.

Yet, you still get Puerto Rico (electricity grid recovery failures of a few levels), and Flint (no clean water for you, because no).

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