DC power has been an option for datacenter equipment since I was a young lad racking and stacking hardware. Cisco, Dell, HPE, IBM, and countless others all had DC supply options. Same with PDUs. What’s old is new again.

See e.g. https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000221234/wiring-in...

It helped that, at the time, most video was broadcast over the air and thus subject to FCC regulations relating to content, and that advertisers would pull funds from stations and networks that aired content that was too controversial. Other, non-regulated or less regulated (“adult”) content was for pay and the systems had child lockouts.

It’s much easier to relinquish parental control of media exposure when the system helps you out by moderating the content. But the Internet changed everything. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be as a parent to oversee media exposure for their children nowadays without pulling the plug on social media altogether.

Suppose they did have the cellular architecture today, but every other fact was identical. They'd still have suffered the failure! But it would have been contained, and the damage would have been far less.

Fires happen every day. Smoke alarms go off, firefighters get called in, incident response is exercised, and lessons from the situation are learned (with resulting updates to the fire and building codes).

Yet even though this happens, entire cities almost never burn down anymore. And we want to keep it that way.

As Cook points out, "Safety is a characteristic of systems and not of their components."

If they're going to yeet configs into production, they ought to at least have plenty of mitigation mechanisms, including canary deployments and fault isolation boundaries. This was my primary point at the root of this thread.

And I hope fly.io has these mechanisms as well :-)