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Comment by robomc | Hacker News Reader

What do you think the suboptimal outcome was in this case?

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).

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With short term outages like this your probably right that a single point of failure doesn't matter.

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.

Sure. But again, I feel like using a "big, everyone uses it" kind of supplier is the best mitigation of the "what if I have to replace this" problem.

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.

> Is it better for websites to be unavailable at different times as opposed to all at the same time?

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.

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