+++
title = "Crowd Strike and single point of failure"
author = ["Michał Sapka"]
date = 2024-07-22T21:35:00+02:00
categories = ["blog"]
draft = false
weight = 2001
image_dir = "blog/images"
image_max_width = 600
abstract = "Our industry is rotten to the core"
+++

We've all seen what Crowd Strike did a few days ago.
Most of us had our share of laughs - unless you had to fix it.
If that's the case - best of luck.

We're already seeing unofficial post-mortems.
CrowdStrike Holdings seems to be a joke of a company with rotten engineering culture.
Those were written by people smarter than me.

What I, however, can't fully understand is how was it even possible?
How one company offering (apparently) mediocre software was able to bring down so many systems?
How have we allowed companies we work in to use such software?
And I mean "we" very figuratively, as most of us has no saying in the decision.
People in control did what other people in control did - bought the same offering and created the same systems.
No one was ever fired for choosing IBM... Crowd Strike!
We have this checkmark checken, so get off our asses.

I mean "we" is our entire industry.
Slowly, step by step, we allowed the rotten business to standardize.
Now we have 2 desktop OSes, 3 server ones.
We run our code on 3 cloud providers.
And, as we see, we install one crappy program.

Until recently, it was entirely different.
Different vendors provided dozens of competing alternatives.
AmigaOS, BeOS, Novel, OS/2.
All of those were viable options, but no.
It had to come to the sad, sorry state of things.
Little guys in 2024 have close to zero chance of creating an alternative.
Big Players don't compete on quality, as they don't need to.
They have all the power to squash any new offering, and the purchasing managers don't care.
It's a standard, so let's use it!

And this is the reason why on Friday, planes couldn't fly and people died as hospitals were down.
It's not because of FOSS, it's not because of any malicious agent.
The reason is standardization of our industry.
It's not only never been as boring as it is now, but it has never been less resident.
If the market was healthy and there were dozens of bigger players instead of a few gigantic ones, no single outage would be as severe.

And the worst part?
No one, who is actually responsible, will be to blame.
No C level asshole will go to jail, or will even visit court.
CrowdStrike will lose some stock value for a few weeks, then it will all be forgotten.
Business as usual.

I grew to think that whatever the stock market likes, is the opposite of what is right.
LLMs, Lay-offs, planet destruction - those are the things the brokers love.
Not healthcare, education, or _preservation of mankind_.
Those things don't make a good get-rich-quick scheme, and therefore are not promoted.
And CEOs are paid in stock!
No wonder that even though we have all the means to make the world a better place, we are making everything to make sure it won't.