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0 pointsdan-robertson4y ago0 comments

Is their anything these big sites could do in this situation, or must they choose between running and maintaining all of their own infra or relying on a single CDN?

0 comments

darkr4y ago

If you have absolutely vanilla CDN requirements, you can run multiple CDNs and fail-over or load balance between them using DNS.

Quite a few Fastly customers have more than vanilla requirements though, and may have a lot of business logic performed within the CDN itself. That Fastly is "just Varnish" and you can perform powerful traffic manipulation is one of it's main selling points.

dan-robertsonOP4y ago

I suppose it’s still a bad experience for the user if some % of attempts to connect fail or if some % of scripts/styles/images fail to load. So I think that means dns information about failures needs to somehow be propagated quickly. Not sure how well that works in practice.

fmajid4y ago

Use two CDNs and DNS providers for redundancy. Gets expensive, but at scale, probably doesn't make a huge difference. More complexity for the site operators to manage, however.

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