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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

>no CDN

Then the website would have burned to the ground during this announcement.

Not if they had enough servers and bandwidth.

This is an inefficient use of government money to in-source everything. If private industry can do something cheaper and more effective, use common sense.

Private industry by definition can't do something cheaper and more effectively because its goal is to make money, not to make a quality or cheap product.

Let's imagine that I had to make a website that could host a million concurrent users once per year. What do you think is cheaper, me acquiring all of the hardware to scale to a million users and then leaving it idle 99.9% of the time, or outsource handling that peak traffic to someone who's already operating at the scale for it?

The UK government does not remotely need the same year-round capacity as a top-tier CDN.

If existing companies utilize cloud providers and CDNs rather than investing in their own in-house infra, doesn’t that signal to you that perhaps your analysis of the situation is flawed?

It’s possible the government is a big enough customer that they could get the necessary economy of scale to make it cost effective, but it also means that they’re going to need to develop a bespoke solution that all government services build on which itself is an expensive endeavor (and politically a liability since such a project can fail to deliver and just balloon in cost).

The government could rent our spare compute as a cloud provider, of course, to recapture expense. Then we can ask how dare the government spy on private citizen web traffic like that.

At what point do you think that sovereignty outweighs price? I think that is the point that GF is on about.

There is a good case for some sort of in-sourcing when it comes to national systems. For example if, say, a Chinese diplomat toddled on over to you (let's say you are a US citizen and an important one) and asked you to use his country's foremost VPN solution for secure communications. Would you?

Now let's muddy the waters somewhat. Zoom? sounds a bit Anglo/Sax ... ish. It isn't of course. It also seems that Zoom forgot to encrypt their encrypted channels. lol.

There's more to security and stuff than cash. I do the boring old security thing for a living. It is boring but I like boring.

Of course sovereignty and overall data security should be considered. My point is that a blanket "no outsourcing" rule is daft and counterproductive.

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