Fastly, Cloud Services, And How My Website Was Taken Down By A Service I'd Never Heard Of.

Vast swathes of the internet were taken down by yesterday's Fastly Outage. Although it was resolved fairly quickly, it certainly cost my company some revenue, and I'm sure had a massive impact on larger sites. Fastly's share price definitely took a knock following this incident, and rightly so.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

Fastly is essentially a CDN (Content Devlivery Network) that aims to speed up and secure websites and cloud services by allowing companies to "offload content to fastly". Ironically, they claim that their service improves the stability of your website/service.

The front-end of my site is hosted on Google's Firebase platform. It seems Google relies on Fastly to speed up content delivery from Firebase. I had never heard of Fastly until it caused my site to go down yesterday. Perhaps this is the problem with relying on cloud services such as Firebase or AWS: You have limited information and no control over what they use in the background.

I wonder if distributed technology such as IPFS would mitigate some of the issues around depending on centralised cloud services?