Re:Fastly Outage
by colesantiago on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @06:13PM
(#27441715)
The main problem is that they had a failover system, the mystery is where was it in this outage?
Why didn't this trigger? where was this system in place to prevent further cascading failures?
> Blame the companies that relied on Fastly
So it's everybody's fault Fastly went down now? That is a new one.
If companyA got affected by this, then either:
1- Its companyA's fault for not having a contingency plan
or
2- Its companyA's accepted risk that this might happen.
We understand you're upset and passionate about this, perhaps now when more information has been published you understand better the circumstances that caused this problem.
Blame the companies that relied on Fastly being up 100% of the time, even though Fastly explicitly states that they might be down any number of hours, and they will even give you money back for that [1]. If they did offer 100% SLA, it would probably be out of budget for most users, as that kind of systems are prohibitively expensive to run.
Depending on a single CDN like Fastly is building an SPOF into your product. It is not less of a design blunder that whatever Fastly did internally to have an outage. If Shopify lost millions because of a short, simple third-party outage they have at least as much of a high-priority postmortem to write and issues to address as Fastly.
[1] - https://docs.fastly.com/products/service-availability-sla