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Comment by morpheuskafka | Hacker News Reader

I know of one organization that uses it to enable early release of a time-embargoed document to prevent server overload when it's released. Instead, everyone downloads the document in advance and they release the password at the release time.

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If you're thinking about FIRST Robotics Competition, then yep that's nail-on-head about what they do. I briefly talked to one of the folks responsible for that system and they mentioned looking into using a CDN, but couldn't match the relatively low cost of serving a static file over HTTP elsewhere. That being said, the traffic is still enough to tank that entire Azure region last time I checked during the release window (other assets on the same host / their other hosts in the same region were incredibly slow to load.)

They should use a cdn

The first method sounds simpler and cheaper. You're over engineering.

I hope you're joking but it is not over-engineering if you're the kind of organization important enough to have the need to release time-embargoed documents on regular basis.

Besides, he didn't suggest they bootstrap their own CDN. It could be as simple as creating a Cloudflare account.

Not joking. If the years have taught me anything that would be pragmatism. You want to introduce a new vendor and cost centre for what? Send your docs out early followed by a password if that's secure 'enough' for your use case.

Any further guesses as to how "important" the organisation is is pointless in the absence of understanding the actual use case.

They could pgp encrypt the file.

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