Company
Date Published
Author
Austin Spires
Word count
650
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Recent significant cloud disruptions underscore the critical dependence of economies on online services, highlighting the importance of resilience as a design principle rather than a contingency plan. Fastly experienced a simultaneous advanced DDoS attack and a shift of traffic from another provider's outage on November 18th, yet managed to maintain seamless service through strategic resilience measures. The company advocates for a multi-vendor strategy to enhance resilience, reduce downtime, and improve global scalability, thereby ensuring a robust user experience by diversifying risk and strengthening infrastructure. This approach necessitates providers to continually earn their traffic by demonstrating consistent performance, especially during unexpected scenarios, and emphasizes architectural decisions that prioritize availability, integrity, and adaptability under varying demands. Fastly positions itself as a leader and advisor in fostering resilient design practices, offering guidance for optimizing high availability and resilience in modern infrastructures.