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Operating at scale is hard. However the internet doesn't require people to "operate at scale". That's the beauty. It's a mash of different (relatively) small a

• baq 3y ago
  In practice, cloudflare or AWS down means half the internet doesn't work at all. The half that works - routing around problematic networks - isn't very helpful when the problematic networks are the useful ones.
  • ta1243 3y ago
    Depends what you want to get to. HN doesn't use any centralised services. If someone chooses to host their service relying on a single unreliable point of failure that's on them. Plenty more hosts on the web.
    • djbusby 3y ago
      Isn't HN centralized on like two servers in CA?
    • solardev 3y ago
      > Depends what you want to get to. HN doesn't use any centralised services. It's also one of the least reliable and performant public forums I've ever used. It goes down or slows down several times a week for me. Wish they'd just move it to the cloud instead of occasionally upgrading the bare metal...
      • inemesitaffia 3y ago
        They used AWS when they had lost their SSD's
    • shanemhansen 3y ago
      Well technically they do, but honestly the number of companies that need to worry about redundant DNS is probably .001%. It does matter for the some people, but as someone from SRE once said "100% availability is the wrong target for basically everything". dig SOA news.ycombinator.com ; <<>> DiG 9.18.16-1-Debian <<>> SOA news.ycombinator.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 10818 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;news.ycombinator.com. IN SOA ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: ycombinator.com. 900 IN SOA ns-225.awsdns-28.com. awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 86400 ;; Query time: 39 msec ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1) (UDP) ;; WHEN: Wed Oct 25 10:52
• mschuster91 3y ago
  > However the internet doesn't require people to "operate at scale". The internet itself does not, yes, but the internet as a system, filled to the brim with bad actors ranging from 14 year old skiddies with Metasploit over hardened Russian ransomware groups to virtually all nations' secret services and militaries does. As soon as you start a server with a globally routed IP address, it will get hammered from all kinds of scanners. Anything on port 80/443 will get bombarded with Wordpress, Drupal and log4j attempts, anything on port 22 will get hounded by people attempting credential stuffing, and anything on port 25/587 by spammers and anyone trying to exploit Exchange/Exim vulnerabilities. It's a nightmare to keep up with that crap alone, and you're one forgotten update away from getting your server 0wned by someone using Shodan and whatnot. And then, once your site, whatever you operate - I've seen as an admin DDoS extortion attacks happen against small sites for dog walker services, pizza parlors or random bloggers as well as large car dealerships - finds itself some opponent for whatever reason, it gets nasty. Be it for political reasons (people don't like what the blogger writes), for the lulz (people don't like a Twitch streamer so they DDoS their sponsors), or for financial extortion, doesn't matter in a time where you can order such attacks for less than the price of your average McDonalds visit. There is no, utterly no, alternative to the giants (Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Akamai). It's sad that it has come to that point, but unless we get the most obnoxious sources of such attacks - enemy nation states (China, Russia) and compromised domestic IoT devices/servers - off of the Internet, there is really no viable alternative.
  • ta1243 3y ago
    > There is no, utterly no, alternative to the giants (Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Akamai). Yet my servers are fine without such services.