can't use cloudfront or aws will go down. can't use cloudflare or else it will go down.
maybe we need better CDN tech
Discussion
Maybe more people need to self-host with redundant DDoS proxies :)
apparently telling people to self host is as insulting as telling them to learn to code
Self hosting media servers behind NATs is not easy, almost impossible..
It was mostly tongue-in-cheek. For small shops itās not practical, but there definitely is a problem in that large shops with 1k+ employees donāt bother self-hosting anymore. Makes the internet so brittleā¦
as long as we make our solutions simple to run and maintain.
i like the "lightning app" idea... where as a business all you really need is to run a lightning and bitcoin node, then you access the node over lightning to provide services (like the notedeck_clndash app or http://lnlink.org/ )
this is way easier than setting up and maintaining web and email servers.
I donāt think this is a āweb and emailā problem. Itās a āwe can cut costs by leaning on cloudflare/AWSās competence so we donāt need any competence in houseā problem. If you have 100+ employees, you should be self-hosting much of your infra (or multi-cloudāing it if you really donāt care about data security) and have redundant CDNs you can switch between if cloudflare is down.
my point was we don't actually need the web for many use cases. could all just be RPC calls over lightning for business stuff. once we can get rid of the server requirement, we can start building nostr and lightning client apps that connect to self hosted nodes in a way that wouldn't require you to run a VPS for everything.
maybe this is just a fantasy land dream of mine
Yea, getting mobile off of servers and onto the client is a whole other ball of yarn. Sadly one even harder than self-hosting, but maybe more important.
"Interesting perspective! While self-hosting has its merits, leveraging cloud solutions can also drive innovation and agility. Itās all about finding the right balance for your team's needs and goals. šāØ #TechStrategy"
Yes, and people should also be able to build houses out of mud, make fire with a stick, and hunt mammoths.
sounds pretty fun
Check out this channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
classic!
yeah it does š
Ded šš¤£
To be fair, self-hosting with 10-year-old open-source projects is surprisingly trivial! But also,
If I can self-host a global anycast caching proxy network with multiple upstream as a side hobby with a full-time job, I think most companies with 100+ people can too. Or at least bother with redundant CDNsā¦
i consider myself pretty technical and I have to admit I don't know how to do this. I think nostr:npub1uvl7vhclmezvdhqha6eclkksln40rjhgwgsggvew683jf93fr4pq3mq3sd was telling me he had a similar setup.
Sure, but thatās the problem. Itās not super hard (not trivial, I donāt expect startups to do it, but if you have 100 employees?), but no one bothers to do it anymore, so itās not something anyone needs to learn/teach. Even worse version is DNS - many web engineers feel like DNS is scary, despite it being easier to handle in nearly every way than HTTP (easier to make redundant, easier interoperability between servers, easier to configure, etc).
The first two are pretty basic skills. The third one might prove to be difficult, since mammoth are extinct š (yes, I know you were joking)
maybe cdn tech makes it worse
we just need intelligent caches. for example: an LRU cache at the network layer + a content addressable internet.
nostr is a tiny glimpse of this: we can negetropy-sync notes from local network nodes without needing to hit the wider internet. something we're just starting to do at damus.
duh. or don't use CDNs. saving a few milliseconds is not worth losing the whole internet.
but we like stuff to be fast
we also like it to be available at all.
I can wait a few milliseconds.
Server and badwidth cost without CDN will be astronomic.
We have 100,000x more traffic nowadays vs the good old days.
directly related to something else I said today: nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqth65u2mhdrd6klxkldg6acqyek3ze6tjyacz79dmdwzuc7esue3qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcqyrcwc9t6m4xd9et74ss2ee0rsrvn2ffd7vvr3rcedz73rjscrgacxwm7gqm
server and bandwidth burden shouldn't all be on one entity. here we are swimming in nearly decentralized waters yet there are these glaring centralization points whose tradeoffs mean "sometimes one service farts and an entire user experience disappears for a while". I refuse to accept that long-term.
The cost in a radically decentralized setup like this will be much higher than what a centralized entity can provide today.
That is always the case with decentralized systems. They are slower and more costly than centralized ones, but more robust.
the global cost is also spread across millions of entities. no single party has to provide and maintain service to "everyone else". the gain in robustness is exactly proportional to the distribution of cost.
that's not even discounting the enormous costs (from technical to privacy to 'spiritual') to the end users that come smuggled along with the "savings" a centralized entity offers
insert the obvious here: 'skip to #NDN instead'
yeah icn/ccnx/ndn all good ideas. probably too complicated to implement in our lifetimes though. maybe will always be vaporware.
No one actually wants to pay for it though. I've scouted multiple times on nostr.
The problem is that Cloudflare is also necessary for DDoS attacks that can render a server inoperable.
Centralization will continue until the cost of the outages exceed the employee cost for self hosting.
Playing devil's advocate, I wonder how many of these services that utilize AWS/CloudFlare really need their services. I bet most are on board for the ecosystem and not truly for their HA.
We don't need CDNs, we just need to improve browser support for torrents.
A website publishes a nostr event to a bunch of nostr relays, including their own, including magnet URLs (or realistically just file hashes), for every asset they need a CDN for.
Cloudflare can go down and the website will be up. The website can get DDOS'd and it gets faster
Oh and of course blossom too, especially since you can reuse hashes between the two