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by wongarsu 505 days ago
Counterargument: centralization leads to all critical infrastructure failing at once, which is far worse than single pieces of infrastructure experiencing intermittent failures at different uncorrelated points in time.
2 comments

Counter-counter-argument: users forgive you when all their other apps are down, too. Countless cloud outages have proven there is safety in numbers. If your app is the only one down, you're having a very bad day. If everyone's app is down, nobody seems to actually care that much. Not enough to start making my outages my own problem instead of just waiting for someone else to fix it, at least.
Yes, I want to also be clear my point was philosophical not technical and i'm not trying to start a flamewar. I don't know there is a "right answer" here - I just have one perspective, I don't see the others as being less valid in exploration. I've thought about your point a lot over the years (I helped build a large cloud provider from scratch) - you might be right I don't know but in my experience outages on less centralized systems tend to go on for longer and are harder to deal with if the surface area is too diffuse, there is probably a happy medium, but I still don't have a problem with cloudflare, they seem generally fine, we've known them a long ass time now. i am quite concerned however about when Matthew and Michelle move on, as I expect they will one day, who takes over... you have to have a lot of gaul to run cloudflare correctly.