I love that somewhere out there is a developer who doesn't even work at Fastly but just innocently pushed a change to their Fastly config and basically broke the entire internet. I'm actually jealous. If it was me, I'd put that on my resume.
Fastly obviously didn’t test their code (with the bug) enough, but testing of course can never prove the absence of bugs. Testing for a global deployment like a massive CDN happens to a large extent in prod because you don’t have another globe. You can test on a smaller scale but eventually you run into a problem that only shows itself at full scale.
> We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change.
in the first sentence
The customer change was a valid configuration. That was yesterday.
Web crawlers are a feature not a bug. If your site shouldn't be crawled, it doesn't belong on the Internet.
Your profitability is not the Internet's problem.
If you cannot generate revenue by your internet content, probably you can’t live from generating content for the internet.
The consequence, IMHO, is that the internet would have this amount of content and usefulness.
Newspapers? No. Can’t live from internet news if anyone can copy a reporter’s work and post it on his own site and dilute traffic.
Online selling? Don’t look like a viable business model, as anyone can copy the photos you paid a photographer for, the descriptions you paid someone to write and the reviews your customers wrote. True reviews are priceless, you now? Even more now that an AI can detect computer generated reviews.
Obviously an open and totally money-free internet is nice, but it wouldn’t be the internet people make a living from.
Can it be used as a CDN for a normal website? How well does it perform?
https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/freenet
> Can it be used as a CDN for a normal website?
No. It's an independent overlay network designed to give anonymity.
> How well does it perform?
It's slow in comparison to the clearnet, but usable for basic things, including torrents (~100+ KB/s speeds).
A web filled with DDOS attacks and scraping is a web that needs cloudflare and fastly. I’m not sure how to avoid this sorry state of things.
I2P doesn’t seem like an immediate solution -- maybe it can resist DDOS, but at the cost of losing fast, easily-accessible, easily-searchable public websites, no? Could Starbucks host their website on I2P, to pick a random example? Seems like a bunch more infrastructure would be needed first.
> Could Starbucks host their website on I2P, to pick a random example?
Yes, they definitely can. Which additional infrastructure is needed? I tried to host websites there myself. Did not see any problems.
A trivial example would be a bug that replaces the configuration for all customers with the last uploaded. Then when the next customer uploads a new (valid!) config, you have a problem.
Obviously it wasn’t that trivial but the point is: it wasn’t the customer’s configuration change that was the problem but some code that managed the config change.
It looks like this guy did just that. And for Fastly. Wow.
"So, did I just hear three distinct light switch clicks?"
Breaking 85% of Fastly's servers is not the same as breaking the entire internet.