Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You
Mood
thoughtful
Sentiment
neutral
Category
tech
Key topics
outage management
software development
infrastructure decisions
The article likely discusses the implications of recent outages on the decision-making process between building or buying software solutions, highlighting key takeaways for tech professionals.
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- 01Story posted
11/19/2025, 4:36:35 PM
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11/19/2025, 4:45:47 PM
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We do this by owning everything we can, and using simple vendors for what we can't.
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.
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
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).
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.
That'd be very inefficient usage of compute. Memory access now has network latency, cache locality doesn't exist, processes don't work. You're basically subverting how computers fundamentally work today. There's no benefit.
I know Kubernetes and containers has everyone thinking servers don't matter but we should have less virtualization, not more. Redundancy and virtualization are not the same thing.
If your shit breaks and everyone else's shit is still working that's a problem.
yeah sure, if your business is one of the 500 startups on HN creating inane shit like a notes app or a calendar, but outages can affect genuine companies that people rely on
It may even be a rational decision to take the downtime if the cost of avoiding it exceeds the expected cost of an eventual downtime, but that's a business decision that requires some serious thought.
that's at the root of all infrastructure decisions, not just web app tech stacks but even something like utility service. I think it gets lost on a lot of technology people because we love to work on big technical things. No one wants a boring answer like a couple webservers and postgres with a backup in a different datacenter when there's a wall of knobs and switches to play with at the hyperscalers.
There would very typically be a large overlap here.
Probably very few companies should build and run their own CDN and internet scale firewall, for example. Doesn't have to be cloudflare, but there aren't any providers that will have zero outages (a homegrown one is likely to be orders of magnitude worse and more expensive).
If I'm building something that allows my customers to do X, then yes I will own the software that allows my customers to do X. Makes sense.
> They’ll craft artisanal monitoring solutions while their actual business logic—the thing customers pay for—runs on someone else’s computer.
So instead I should build an artisanal hosting solution on my own hardware that I purchase and maintain? I could drop proxmox on them and go from there, or K8s, or even just bare metal and systemd scripts.
But my business isn't about any of those things, its about X. How does owning and running my own hardware get me closer to delivering on X?
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