The Resilience of Simplicity

2021-06-10

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In light of the recent Fastly CDN outage which affected major websites all over the world, I find myself reflecting on the astounding intricacy of the modern Web, and how elegant Gemini is in comparison.

As the popularity of the Internet grows and more people use it regularly, all sorts of tools and systems have been developed to keep up with demand. CDNs play a big part of that, serving content from geographically-diverse locations in order to reduce load and get data to users faster. Many organizations rely on CDNs entirely to provide their services to end users.

That reliance becomes a central point of failure if something happens to the CDN which is exactly what happened with Fastly. As a system grows in complexity, more and more central failure points ca be created, and in time it can become almost impossible to manage them all. This, I believe, is one reason why Web engineer roles pay so well these days, and why so much effort has gone into developing tools that can automatically detect and fix problems.

Gemini certainly has single points of failure as well. The protocol requires TLS, so if a host's TLS certificate somehow becomes corrupted, the entire site becomes inaccessible. Of course server software and the physical connection itself can fail, leading to the same effect. But with Gemini, the number of central failure points is far smaller than the number of central failure points for Web services, and the protocol's simplicity plays a direct role in that.

One reason I like simple systems is that they can only fail in a few ways. A hammer, for example, can only fail in a few ways: the handle could break, the head could separate from the handle, the head could get damaged, the hammer could miss its target, or the hammer could slip out of one's hand. Each of these things can easily be monitored and cared for, either preventively or after the fact. Gemini is similar, and it's another draw to the protocol for me.

I think other areas of life can be improved by returning to simpler tools. It often makes failures a little easier to deal with.

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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]