Found it, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31801947
edit: Not that I necessarily agree with the article even in light of there being an outage, cloudflare has been pretty good for us. Just thought it was interesting.
But if you look at his math, it was correct. The era of client-server connected heterogeneous distributed Internet is just a side show today.
The solution has been centralization (clarification: big companies run their own caches and networks near users). and growth of caches and then Cloudflare taking care of the rest.
Centralization and growth of caches are on their face contradictory.
Perhaps you mean organizational centralization but that really has nothing to do with internet capacity demands. Your hot take isn’t so brilliant. What’s fundamentally wrong with edge distribution?
Yes. This is exactly what I mean. Big companies run their own caches and networks near users. Cloudflare takes care of the rest.
>What’s fundamentally wrong with edge distribution?
You incorrectly assume judgement from my part. My point is that things have changed. New problems arise in solution to old problems. Fragility from small number of organizations running their caches to solve bandwidth problem.
Not only the US.
Care to clarify so I could take the mandatory contrarian approach?
So yeah, how is a CDN centralizing your infra? You could just have your CNAMEs point to a different provider or directly to your gateways. Or you could even go down the multi CDN path, and have someone like ns1 automatically redirect your CNAMEs to an alternate CDN on a per-geo basis to overcome local failures.
It's just another SaaS component in your system. You could self host if you're willing to take on the ownership challenge, and at certain scale it would even be more cost effective.
Technically you could set up a separate DNS/failover somewhere else and use a backup reverse proxy/TLS terminator/CDN SaaS similar to CloudFlare, but then that somewhere else will be your point of failure.