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Is it really that bad? Services go down for a few minutes, maybe a few hours? A thousand other companies are down at the same time. Grab lunch, come back, and

Is it really that bad? Services go down for a few minutes, maybe a few hours? A thousand other companies are down at the same time. Grab lunch, come back, and it'll have fixed itself. Nobody blames you because it's just another provider outage -- whether it's Cloudflare or AWS or Microsoft or Gmail doesn't really matter, it's a convenient outsourcing of not just network admin but also blame. The alternative is, what, doing it all in-house with a bunch of people on pager duty? Few companies can afford that. Diversifying across multiple cloud providers? Sure, if multi-nines uptime is really critical for your business. For most small-med businesses, it's more valuable to be able to rapidly build on top of existing, professionally-maintained infrastructure in order to deliver some unique business value on top of it, than to recreate that basic network infra themselves. If you're not a FAANG, going down for a few hours a year isn't really a big deal. Especially when you can just blame it on an overall "internet outage at some big provider" rather than some internal fuck-up.

csomar 3y ago
I don't think the problem is a few minutes of down time but all services going down at the same time. You can't order food (Uber down), your email down, your TV down, maybe even the traffic control?
- solardev 3y ago
  Ok, and...? (Edit: Not to be snarky, but really, so what if that happens? Same thing happens if there's a power outage in your neighborhood. Is it a big deal?)
  - king_phil 3y ago
    Are power outages even a thing? My PC at home (germany) is always on, so I'd notice, and I'm involved with energy at our data center (Frankfurt, Germany) and home and external data center had no outage for the last 20 years, at a minimum.
    - solardev 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - seabrookmx 3y ago
      Yes, rural communities exist.
    - pinkgolem 3y ago
      Germany has an average of 30 minutes of downtime per person per year, Amerika seems to be around 8 hours Could not find data how this is distributed..
pixl97 3y ago
>Grab lunch Sorry man, our Stripe terminals aren't working, we can't even accept cash... Um, come back later.
- solardev 3y ago
  That actually happens with some frequency where I live, and they either use the old-school card imprint machines, or take down your number manually, or some terminals have an offline mode where it'll save the cards and then batch-run them later. It's also rare enough that it's not an issue at all in regular life. Edit: Just to clarify, obviously this can't be both common and rare... what I meant is that different neighborhoods will frequently go down, but there's usually some neighborhood within a 10-min drive that still has power, or some food truck has a cellular connection off their iPad PoS that still works, or you happen to have cash in your wallet or whatever or know the guy and they'll just put it on your tab for next time, whatever. I live in a semi-rural community in Oregon and we have a lot of small businesses, a lot of wildfires, and not a whole lot of infrastructure. We just kinda make do when things happen. A couple weeks ago, half the town lost power for the whole day, and the other half of the town just got some increased business and traffic. Life was back to normal the next day.

csomar 3y ago

I don't think the problem is a few minutes of down time but all services going down at the same time. You can't order food (Uber down), your email down, your TV down, maybe even the traffic control?

solardev 3y ago
Ok, and...? (Edit: Not to be snarky, but really, so what if that happens? Same thing happens if there's a power outage in your neighborhood. Is it a big deal?)
- king_phil 3y ago
  Are power outages even a thing? My PC at home (germany) is always on, so I'd notice, and I'm involved with energy at our data center (Frankfurt, Germany) and home and external data center had no outage for the last 20 years, at a minimum.
  - solardev 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - seabrookmx 3y ago
    Yes, rural communities exist.
  - pinkgolem 3y ago
    Germany has an average of 30 minutes of downtime per person per year, Amerika seems to be around 8 hours Could not find data how this is distributed..

pixl97 3y ago

>Grab lunch Sorry man, our Stripe terminals aren't working, we can't even accept cash... Um, come back later.

solardev 3y ago
That actually happens with some frequency where I live, and they either use the old-school card imprint machines, or take down your number manually, or some terminals have an offline mode where it'll save the cards and then batch-run them later. It's also rare enough that it's not an issue at all in regular life. Edit: Just to clarify, obviously this can't be both common and rare... what I meant is that different neighborhoods will frequently go down, but there's usually some neighborhood within a 10-min drive that still has power, or some food truck has a cellular connection off their iPad PoS that still works, or you happen to have cash in your wallet or whatever or know the guy and they'll just put it on your tab for next time, whatever. I live in a semi-rural community in Oregon and we have a lot of small businesses, a lot of wildfires, and not a whole lot of infrastructure. We just kinda make do when things happen. A couple weeks ago, half the town lost power for the whole day, and the other half of the town just got some increased business and traffic. Life was back to normal the next day.