[onion2k]

You can't build your own Cloudflare in any meaningful sense. You can choose not to have the functionality Cloudflare provides because you prioritize the risk of a Cloudflare outage as more important than the benefits Cloudflare gives you, but that probability tree is probably going to land in Cloudflare's favor for 99.99% of businesses.

If you can build a system with redundancy to continue working even if Cloudflare is unavailable then you should, but most years that's going to be a waste of time.

I think you'd be better off spending the time building good relationships with your customers and users so that in the event of an outage that's beyond your control they trust your business and continue to be happy customers when you're back up and running.

[mrweasel]

Exactly, CloudFlare falls squarely in the "Buy" category. This is not a product you just build, you'd overpay massively for global capacity.

In general I think people are overreaction to the CloudFlare outage and most of these types of articles aren't really thought all the way through.

Also the conclusion on Jurassic Park is wrong. Hammond "spared no expense" yet Nedry was a single point of failure? Seems like they spared at least some expense in the IT department

[chasd00]

> Also the conclusion on Jurassic Park is wrong. Hammond "spared no expense" yet Nedry was a single point of failure? Seems like they spared at least some expense in the IT department

Even if they did "spare no expense" they could have wound up in the same situation. I see this a lot, "it would be better if only we spent more money" but the only thing casually related to increasing expense is increased withdrawals from the bank account. Spending more money doesn't guarantee a better outcome see US public schools for example.

edit: coming back to this. Was the Cloudflare outage really caused by reading a file that was over 200 lines when the process can only handle a max of 200? That's a good example, I'm sure Cloudflare spared no expense in that part of their infrastructure yet here they are (or were).

[dmoy]

> I'm sure Cloudflare spared no expense in that part of their infrastructure yet here they are

Almost everyone developing software spares some expense. It's maybe the main argument you can make for why it's engineering vs not. It's a cost-benefit tradeoff.

Cloudflare isn't doing e.g. super expensive formally verified software up and down its whole stack, practically nobody does that.

[cess11]

The movie doesn't do the book justice. In the book Nedry leads an on-shore team of developers, implied to be high-end competence based in Cambridge. The reason he is the only one on-site is because InGen don't want knowledge about the dinosaurs to leak before they launch the park, so the team basically develops from false or deficient premises and Nedry is the one who can compensate for this.

Nedry is a contractor and presumably reasonably payed, but the job would be awful regardless of how much money he'd make. He's alone, the rest of the on-site employees regard his technical wizardry with deep suspicion and his work habits with disgust. His boss, Hammond, can't stop himself from interfering. Dodgson gives him a way out, in the form of a large cash payment at an airport.

In the book Hammond is a truly ruthless businessman and it makes quite decent satire of the character. When he says things like 'no expense spared' or 'I like kids' it's more like it's coming from an Elon Musk on a stim bender than the warm and aloof Hammond of the movie. In the book, when Hammond comes under pressure he reacts with rage, like when they've realised that Nedry is gone and that Arnold will have to go through the source code himself. At that point Hammond is screaming expletives at his employees, who calmly respond that he instead should go to the cafeteria and get a coffee.

It should also be added that according to the book the reason the park fails is not because it has a single point of failure, but that it is a complex system and inherently uncontrollable. To some extent this shows in the Malcolm character in the movie as well but they do very little with this except having him deliver a few one-liners and the chaos talk with the water drops early on.

[toddgardner]

Yea agreed. I don't build my own CDNs.

But I don't choose cloudflare either, because its too complicated and I don't need that. So I choose the simplest possible thing with as little complexity as possible (for me, that was BunnyCDN). If it goes down, its usually obviously why. And I didn't rely on anything special about it, so I can move away painlessly.

[arbol]

Your customers are also likely down if they run online services