Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

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> Cloud-managed NoSQL databases is the potential for zero-downtime maintenance.

Aah yes... that magical "zero-downtime" cloud, lots of promises are made by the cloud providers in that area but all eventually broken at some point. Its a fact of life with technology unfortunately. :)

No need for the cloud with ScyllaDB[1], CockroachDB[2] and others all being used in production.

LetsEncrypt chose their setup for perfectly valid reasons they described on their blog[3]. Please describe your expertise for saying they're "doing it wrong", because its clear from their blog they put a lot of time thinking about it.

[1]https://www.scylladb.com/ [2]https://www.cockroachlabs.com/ [3]https://letsencrypt.org/2021/01/21/next-gen-database-servers...

While absolutely "zero downtime" is hard to guarantee in the face of massive catastrophic system failure, a distributed NoSQL database like Scylla should prove to be survivable with the loss of any one datacenter. (You'd have to knock out two of three, or all three datacenters to pull us down. Is that still possible? Sure.) I do recommend people put a lot of thought and some actual chaos monkeying into their "zero downtime" architectures.

https://www.scylladb.com/2021/03/23/kiwi-com-nonstop-operati...

I'm not an expert, and I'm not saying they're doing it wrong.

But for what it's worth, just because they thought for a long time doesn't mean they made the right choices. Some of their design decisions have been not great. You can still create perfectly valid domain certs for domains you don't control with a variety of common attacks. Then there was the ACME API vulns. Either they knew about all this and chose a simpler design that's more flawed on purpose, or all that thinking just didn't end up being correct.

Yawn. If you're after a Let's Encrypt bashing session then I suggest you take it elsewhere.

They might not be perfect, but you get what you pay for, just like open-source software. Free but no warranty. Fine by me since Let's Encrypt is available 99.999% of the time, outages are the exception rather than the rule (plus you should always be renewing your certs in good time and not at the last minute).

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