The Fragile Reality of Modern IT

People rely too heavily on the assumption that things just work. The systems we use and depend on daily are often more fragile than we think.

Take, for example, a status page designed to signal unavailability. If it runs in the same AWS region as the services it monitors, it will likely fail during an outage—precisely when it’s needed most.

Consider these common points of failure:

• Thousands of NPM/Gems/other packages used in production systems, maintained by individuals scattered across the globe with unknown intentions.
• Decentralized services that still become unavailable due to an outage in a single cloud region.
• Banks that go offline because of a data center failure on the other side of the world.

All of this is quite fragile, yet, in a way, it’s logical. Truly redundant solutions are expensive, achieving full decentralization is complex, and the willingness to take risks is high. After all, much of the industry advice is a variation on “Fail fast, learn faster.”

But why should the foundational components you build upon be significantly better than the systems you create yourself? Why wouldn’t they also make the same difficult compromises?

Redundant and secure solutions are only truly valued the moment a failure occurs. And since that failure might never happen, the investment often goes unappreciated. The mantra remains: Time is money. Ship Early, Ship Often.

As a local example, a system commissioned by the Czech state for $5,000,000 couldn’t handle 200,000 users on election day. This illustrates that even a solid budget is no guarantee for a well-executed project.

Chaos, not binary perfection, surrounds us. This fragility is a price we implicitly pay for the pursuit of speed and efficiency.

The deeper our dependency on these systems grows, the more aware we become of this reality. Everything is vulnerable. The true goal, therefore, is not to chase after 100% security, but to focus on building resilient systems. Resilience over perfection.