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Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

Yes its really odd that core backbone providers can go down and everything works like its supposed to. Even trans-pacific cables can be cut and things will usually work with only increased latency. But there is not much redundancy for many companies at this layer; having redundant DNS providers is I'm sure possible but not something we think about very often, and of course many of the sites that are down are depending on the proxy and DOS mitigation services.

On my home network I use Google as a backup DNS provider so the whole internet didn't go dark for me, but I don't have a backup DNS host for my company's DNS records.

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Redundant DNS is possible, but challenging when you're making use of features like geo DNS that don't lend themselves to easy replication via zone transfer.

I imagine most people would never expect something like this to happen, so having a fallback option when Cloudflare has a huge interruption of service like this is just unthinkable.

All the major cloud infrastructure providers have had outages of varying severity at one point or another...it's something you'd want to take into account for, say, a system that remote controls life-critical devices, but likely isn't worth the engineering time and added complexity for a productivity or social app with a small userbase. Working on many of the latter over the years I've generally said "well if {major cloud provider} is down, the internet is going to be all messed up for a bit anyway, so we'll accept the risk of being down when they're down, and reassess whether that keeps making sense as we grow."

>"well if {major cloud provider} is down, the internet is going to be all messed up for a bit anyway, so we'll accept the risk of being down when they're down, and reassess whether that keeps making sense as we grow."

This is a very common pattern and falls into the 'nobody got fired for buying cisco/microsoft/intel' trap.

I have two issues with it;

1) It entrenches the largest provider.

You would not extend the same leniency's of outages to the third best cloud provider, this means that people will just keep pushing the monopoly forward. Even if the uptime or service is actually better on another provider.

2) You create a tight coupling of monocultures;

Simply put: You slowly erode the internet. Your site becomes an application in a distributed mainframe operated by a tiny minority of tech companies universally based in the US.

Why is this a problem? I could give moral answers here but I thing pragmatic ones are more convincing..

Giving ownership of the internet to the few gives them the ability to set the rules.

If you're on Amazon's AWS, what's to say they don't inspect your e-commerce systems and incorporate your business logic into their amazon.com shopping experience. They do this to their marketplace and create competing products already[0].

If you're doing really well, why not just drop a few packets here and there? I mean, they wont.. you're paying, right?

Hell, if you do super well they can just change the rules and make it so your services get expensive in the exact way you use them, or even legislate you off the platform entirely.

Probably wont happen, but it's a lot of trust you have to admit, and people shit on Apple for having that kind of power, and Apple is not even competing in the same market as most people on this site.

If you're on google cloud (which, I'm a fan of btw) and you feed an ML model, well, you paid for it but why shouldn't they also have a copy.. after all, it's green to do so! Their bigdata platform? Google loves data! Feed the beast.

[0]: https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/

The trust you have to give AWS or other cloud providers is not that different than the trust you give any number of vendors (email service, phone service, etc.). You have a contract with them that says they won’t do those things, and if they ever get caught doing them all the on-premise enterprise they’re spending a lot of effort on getting on board will dry up instantly.

Amazon can copy your business model just fine without looking at your servers. Most of what’s on your servers is probably irrelevant from their perspective.

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