Keep the Lights On

tarazkp (85)in Finance and Economy • 2 days ago

With Cloudflare handling twenty percent of the internet traffic, it obviously has an effect when it goes down. All of the Hive interfaces I use were unavailable, but it was only for a few hours and well, it isn't a critical event for me. However, I think it should serve as a warning for the world that is becoming increasingly reliant on a decreasing pool of infrastructure and service providers, with very little risk mitigation. Essentially, the larger the company, the more diverse their infrastructure and service provider streams need to be.

But that is too expensive.

And since they aren't held accountable for their failure to provide service, why pay?

One of the "problems" with decentralisation is that it is not very efficient at some things, as there are a lot of overlaps and conflicts and "wasted" resources. But when failures happen as they inevitably do, those wasted resources make the environment robust. Not quite failproof, but far more likely to survive.

Think of it a bit like a group of 100 companies all doing similarish things, like in the IT area. There are 100 CEOs and 100 CFOs, and 100 CTOs. Then there are multiple vice and director positions and all the employee overlap. There are 100 finance departments and 100 HR departs. You get the idea. If all of those companies combined into one conglomerate, a lot of savings can be made by getting rid of 99 of many of the highly paid positions, as well as consolidating all the departments into far smaller teams.

More profits.

But when there are 100 companies, it is unlikely that they are all going to fail simultaneously, which means that say 10% fail a year, many of those who are left unemployed will be absorbed into the other 90%, especially since some of the business overlaps. If a company that is a sole provider within the 100 fails, then it is likely that if the product is needed, a group will soon fill the vacuum. When there is one large company that fails though, the hit can be quite extreme and it can take a long time for recovery.

It seems we have become accustomed to becoming reliant on large enterprises because it seems cheaper, but what we are actually doing is opening ourselves up to more risk, because when they fail to provide, we are going to suffer. But it isn't only in the corporations that this happens, because we also do this in terms of military support. After World War Two the US created a great plan to take control of the world defences by encouraging the disarmament of most other nations. With the costs of rebuilding Europe, this was readily accepted, and the centralisation of military power concentrated in the US, Russia and more recently, China. The problem for Europe now is, that the US is no longer a reliable service provider.

Time to decentralise again.

If centralisation ever works, it is only ever at a very small scale, like for a tribe. But as soon as that group is too diverse in preference and needs, centralisation is no longer able to serve the group, because there are too many conflicting opinions. Centralisation is a dictatorship, which is fine, when everyone agrees with the dictator. That generally isn't the case though, so centralisation is pretty much always, a rule by force system.

And while everyone is celebrating trillion dollar companies, they are seemingly failing to realise that they are putting themselves in increasingly risky positions, because the bigger they are, they harder they fall. The stock market crashes are not caused by mum and dad corner stores failing to sell enough milk and bread, they are caused by countries, financial institutions and corporations of immense size playing games with centralised investing practices. I don't mean that they are putting all their eggs in one basket, but they are putting all their eggs into a thousand risky baskets that are largely tied to nothing very concrete. Like the dotcom bubble, and the current AI bubble.

But there is no personal risk to them as individuals.

So they roll the dice, pad their pockets all they can while the going is good, and when it collapses, walk away while the people's money they were playing with is lost and they are suffering. And then the same losers are billed for bailing out the failing companies, and the very people who caused the failure, get a fresh start to begin the cycle again.

What if there was physical risk to the individual leaders?

For example, what if a company worth one billion fails, the CEO and the board are automatically bankrupted. A company worth 100B sees the CEO and board bankrupted and imprisoned, and the next layer of leaders also bankrupted. A 1T company sees longer imprisonments, more bankruptcies and a 10 year ban on being in any leadership positions.

Just spitballing there obviously, but what I mean is if there was accountability, like the story of engineers in Roman times having to stand under the bridges they built when they were first opened. If a company fails to deliver the service they are paid to deliver, like Cloudflare, should there be accountability? Should the CEO have to resign? The CTO? Should they have to cover all the costs of lost revenue to the affected users? Should the very large businesses like OpenAI that apparently had no redundancies in place have to cover the cost of the users who pay to rely on access?

It all becomes very untenable, doesn't it?

So instead, there is no accountability for anyone, but the users will continually pay the price of failure, whether it be company, corporation or country failure.

Relying on centralisation is always accepting a large amount of risk, because it is not only a point of incompetence failure, it is also a target for malicious attack. It is inevitable that things go wrong, and eventually everything will fail to defend against an attack. The only way to really reduce risk is through diversity of service, people, material supply and everything else. While it might be cheaper and more convenient to have large economies of scale with large providers, it creates a massive problem when the provider fails to provide.

I tried Peakd, Hive.blog, Ecency and Inleo.

Were any Hive interfaces left standing during the Cloudflare outage?

Taraz
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2 days ago in Finance and Economy by tarazkp (85)

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bozz (81) yesterday

I was having a conversation with some of my colleagues via email today about the cloud flare thing and one of them said this:

"To play a little as the Devil's Advocate, I kind of appreciate the modern coordinated outages compared to the old environment where random sites were constantly breaking in random ways."

It's definitely a different way to look at things when most of us were bemoaning or mocking the situation this morning.