The problem is that if fastly is the best choice for a company then there's zero incentive for the company to choose another vendor. Everyone acting in their own best interest results in a sub-optimal global outcome.
It's actually one of the major problems with the global, winner-takes-all marketplace that's evolving with the internet.
As a software engineer I live by the ethos that coupling and dependency is bad, but if you unravel the layers you start to realise much of our life is centralised:
Roads, trains, water, electricity, internet
These are quite consolidated and any of these going down would be very disruptive to our lives. Connected software, ie the internet, is still quite new. Being charitable, are these just growing pains in the journey to building out foundational infrastructure?
At home I have emergency power, water and internet. If the trains stop I drive, if the car breaks I take the train.
There is even a competitive advantage in living with the risk, as you have less costs and overhead... Sure, you might have an outage once every x years for a few minutes... But that's obviously the fault of the development team, duh
Data centers offer the highest uptime guarantees at the highest price tiers. People pay more for Toyotas, new or used, because of their reputation. Quality is a product feature. If MBA's want to decide if they can cut corners, there are already upsides and downsides, the calculation is something they need to make.
Quality is a product feature when there is competition, monopolies don't suffer from cutting quality.
I find that people have a tendency to be overly narrow in considering competition and declaring things monopolies. There are alternative ways to get tasks done that avoid relying on (and paying for) low-quality internet services if companies find it necessary.
And we are specifically talking about an industry over-relying on a single provider of a service. If there were a variety of competing services, the entire point would be moot.
> Roads, trains, water, electricity, internet
I guess the difference here is that you're (mostly) talking about physical infra, which by definition must be local to where it's being used. We allow (enforce?) a monopoly on power distribution (and separate distribution from generation) because it doesn't make sense to have every power company run their own lines. But with that monopoly comes regulation.
Digital services are different. The entire value prop is that you can have an infinite number and the marginal cost of "hooking up" a new customer is ~$0. This frequently leads to a natural winner-take-all market.
One way to address this is to add regulation to digital services, saying that they must be up x% of the time or respond to incidents in y minutes or whatever. But another way to address it is to ensure it's easy for new companies to disrupt the incumbents if they are acting poorly. The first still leads to entrenched incumbents who act exactly as poorly as they can get away with. The second actually has a chance of pushing incumbents out, assuming the rules are being enforced. And now you've basically re-discovered the current American antitrust laws.
As far as any individual company's best interests, like anything else in engineering, it's about risk vs. reward.
What's the cost of having a backup CDN (cost of service, cost of extra engineering effort, opportunity cost of building that instead of something else, etc.) vs. the cost of the occasional fastly downtime?
I have to imagine that for most companies the cost of being multi-CDN isn't worth what they lose with a little down time (or four hours of downtime every four years).
This is good reasoning but I don't think it's possible to legislate service level objectives like that.
> But another way to address it is to ensure it's easy for new companies to disrupt the incumbents if they are acting poorly.
I agree but realistically there will be many cases when a company is far better at something than anyone else. I think the only way to avoid global infra single points of failure is competitive bidding and multi-source contracts, plus competitive pressure to force robustness (which already works quite well).
I know plenty of people in Texas who will be buying solar panels and batteries after last winter. I will be doing the same.
> Do you roll your own ISP + telecoms network?
If I could magically get fiber directly to an IX I would gladly be my own ISP. I have confidence I would do as good a job or better than the ISPs I’ve had over the years (yes I realize having hundreds of thousands of customers to service is more difficult than a single home).
I have actually been in the position of having to rely on non-mains power all my life.
It bloody sucks.
Because it seems like a relatively recent development that off-grid solar power solutions have become affordable and mature enough to not suck on average.
... And how is this relevant?
... And how is this relevant?
As to the second half of your original question, solar power is not the only kind of backup power that exists.
Is it better for websites to be unavailable at different times as opposed to all at the same time? This seems to be a really common assumption people make re these occasional cloud take-downs, but I don't really understand why people think it.
Seems to me that in cases like this, everyone operating in their own self interest, by all using the best value service, is actually the best outcome. Everyone suffered the same outage at the same time, which minimised the overall cost of the outage (one resolution, one communication line etc. as opposed to many).
It's the longer term outages that are the problem. That's because we start talking about knock on effects.
It's not really a problem if your supplier (and all others) have a short term issue (assuming you don't run super lean). It may be a headache if your supplier has a longer term issue while you set up another supplier (or use your less desired one) but it's not a disaster. It's a big problem if all suppliers are down for more than a short time.
I'd assume people seeing this as a market failure are talking about it in the "this highlights the problem" kind of way, not the "this event was a true disaster" way.
If a massive vendor shutters or has a long term failure, at least you're in the same boat as a bunch of experts, which is a much better place to be than "my obscure or self-rolled solution is now orphaned / hacked / broken".
The unspoken assumption always seems to be "my self-configured solution will have fewer and/or shorter issues than the massive publicly traded solution that everyone uses" but that seems ... very incorrect.
Also... a reverse proxy / CDN always is a single point of failure. The question is... is it a single point of failure that you personally own. In my opinion shared single points of failure are desirable. It's just obviously more efficient.
Yes. If one site is down, it may hurt my productivity a little bit, and I may have to adjust what I work on. But if the entire internet is down that has drastic impact on my productivity, and depending on what I am working on at the time, may completely block me.