If you can build a system with redundancy to continue working even if Cloudflare is unavailable then you should, but most years that's going to be a waste of time.

I think you'd be better off spending the time building good relationships with your customers and users so that in the event of an outage that's beyond your control they trust your business and continue to be happy customers when you're back up and running.

I fear this is easy to misconstrue.

For example, I was at a company that, as I learned how everything worked, realized that we were spending $20k / month for cloud services to basically process about as much real-time data as a CD player processes.

I joked that we should be able to run our entire product on a single server running in the office. (Then I pointed out that this was a joke and that running in the cloud gave us amazing redundancy that we didn't have to implement ourselves.) My point was to show that our architecture was massively bloated and overengineered for what we were doing. (IE, the cost of serialization to send messages was more than the actual processing that was happening. The cost was both money, and the fact that we were spending more time working on messaging than the actual product.)

BUT: There's many times where we could easily say, "this would be so much easier if we had our own server in the office." And, if we misconstrue the above quote, we could convince ourselves to run our own server in the office.

If I'm building something that allows my customers to do X, then yes I will own the software that allows my customers to do X. Makes sense.

> They’ll craft artisanal monitoring solutions while their actual business logic—the thing customers pay for—runs on someone else’s computer.

So instead I should build an artisanal hosting solution on my own hardware that I purchase and maintain? I could drop proxmox on them and go from there, or K8s, or even just bare metal and systemd scripts.

But my business isn't about any of those things, its about X. How does owning and running my own hardware get me closer to delivering on X?

If I use CloudFlare, it will also go down, but probably for less time, and someone else has to be up at 2am fixing it.

> Build what delivers your value.

Like Hershey builds grocery stores?

Like Budweiser builds bars?

This can’t be serious.

We live in a society.

There would very typically be a large overlap here.

Probably very few companies should build and run their own CDN and internet scale firewall, for example. Doesn't have to be cloudflare, but there aren't any providers that will have zero outages (a homegrown one is likely to be orders of magnitude worse and more expensive).

It may even be a rational decision to take the downtime if the cost of avoiding it exceeds the expected cost of an eventual downtime, but that's a business decision that requires some serious thought.

If your shit breaks and everyone else's shit is still working that's a problem.