this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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Yes, Netflix had their own infrastucture in addition to other multiple redundant cloud services for their CDNs: You're kind of proving (part of) my point?
How? Their reliability would exist without that. There's nothing inherent to their own data center that makes their setup that much better. Having a distributed system across multiple cloud service providers means your actual chance of downtime (here I mean inverse of uptime) is their individual chances of uptime multiplied by each other. In other words, they all have to go down for your service to fail. The catch is you have to use only commodity IaaS and PaaS, nothing proprietary to one CSP.
For smaller companies especially, in terms of pure reliability, there's no reason to think that they would be better at running a high availability data center than Microsoft or AWS or Google.
Parallel distributed architectures give you the advantages of using public cloud (not having to physically manage your own data center) without the disadvantages (dependence on any one cloud vendor), while also potentially increasing your reliability beyond the reliability of any one of your cloud vendors . That is why Netflix is so rock solid.
You really don't see the risk of having no data centers you actually control as an organization? Maybe I misunderstood your initial statement? At first it sounded like we kind of agreed with each other but didn't understand that was the case at first.
This really depends on what you think you're getting from having your own DC. Is it reliability? Flexibility? Control? What are your objectives?
There's some argument to be made to have some locally hosted stuff for some flexibility and control. And in some niche cases the pricing of public offerings doesn't make sense.
But as I said, if you're building your own data center for increased reliability then 1) you're necessarily assuming the premise that you're going to be better at managing DCs than Google, Microsoft and AWS which I think in reality would be hard to prove let alone do, and 2) is hard to justify considering you can distribute workloads across multiple data centers already (as proven by the Netflix example) so that your reliability isn't limited by any one vendor.