Unpkg CDN down causing dependent website outages

Unless you&#x27;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&#x27;t need one for scaling purposes. I&#x27;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&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jsdelivr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jsdelivr.com&#x2F;</a><p>There is also a tool to simplify migration <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jsdelivr.com&#x2F;unpkg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jsdelivr.com&#x2F;unpkg</a>

its a fascinating little tech-anthropology quirk that front-end&#x2F;web developers use the term &quot;CDN&quot; to mean a different thing from how devops&#x2F;sre&#x2F;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 &quot;unpkg cdn down...&quot; reads as a massive &quot;oh shit!&quot; to infra&#x2F;devops type cloudflare customers who then have to immediately worry that their site is down, only to realize no, they&#x27;re fine, this is just devs using the term to mean a different thing (roughly: &quot;third party javascript host&quot;).

So what was the issue?<p>Unpkg runs on Fly with Cloudflare as CDN.

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.