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by gansai 1832 days ago
wouldn't websites have alternate CDN's managing their traffic, why should they have a single point of failure ?

I was assuming there are couple of services like Fastly and companies might have architected keeping in mind the alternatives too, I guess.

2 comments

Normally you configure your a record to point at the cdn as the cdn is the thing that gives you multiple points of failure (caches all over the world). Hard to have a fallback to that. Running multiple cdns would be extremely expensive. Cdn caches are kept useful by traffic running through them, so hard to have a backup for that too.
Because interacting and switching between cdns can be very complicated and/or costly

It should be planned for, especially by major tech organizations like reddit, or Amazon, etc.

But I won't fault news organizations, who already don't have boatloads of money for not having fail over cdns