Unless you're running a site that you know is constantly getting hits from all over the globe, using a CDN will make your site load slower for some users.<p>And you almost certainly don't need one for scaling purposes. I've handled frontpage traffic multiple times without.<p>What I wish existed (or maybe does) is something like a CDN with ~8 global locations that promises to keep your static site in a warm cache for a small fee, without me having to set up a fly.io app manually. That would let my blog always load fast anywhere on the planet even for the first hit in a region.
“Works on my machine”<p>Depend on external services, die by external services. If you can’t afford redundancy, then you must accept downtime.<p>I build all of my dependent libraries locally and bundle with my app. For one application, I maintain and build the entire OS from source. I depend on aws,azure cloud storage for my own hosted cdn. I can fail back to my own hosts if necessary.
This is one thing I never understood about web development.<p>I would have thought the risks from 3rd party production dependencies would make devs do all in their power to minimize them. But IIUC it's a somewhat common practice.<p>Is there something about the market dynamics that make this a reasonable tradeoff? E.g., the problems are rare and this somehow allows faster time to market?<p>(Asking as a systems programmer, very much not a web developer.)
I invite everyone affected to consider switching to a production focused CDN <a href="https://www.jsdelivr.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jsdelivr.com/</a><p>There is also a tool to simplify migration <a href="https://www.jsdelivr.com/unpkg" rel="nofollow">https://www.jsdelivr.com/unpkg</a>
its a fascinating little tech-anthropology quirk that front-end/web developers use the term "CDN" to mean a different thing from how devops/sre/infra people use the term.<p>in the strictest sense, unpkg is not a cdn. unpkg is a javascript library hosting service that uses cloudflare as a cdn. cloudflare is not down, therefore this headline "unpkg cdn down..." reads as a massive "oh shit!" to infra/devops type cloudflare customers who then have to immediately worry that their site is down, only to realize no, they're fine, this is just devs using the term to mean a different thing (roughly: "third party javascript host").
I assume the developers who use a free third party service for serving their dependencies are the same devs who :pikachu_face: when they are told they can’t statically link GPL libraries into their proprietary apps.