Misunderstanding That "Dependency" Comic
17 hours ago
- #cloud computing
- #dependency
- #open source
- Major cloud providers (Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Cloudflare) experienced significant outages in 2025, disrupting services globally.
- The XKCD comic about dependency is often misapplied to these outages, as cloud providers are not small indie companies but large, influential corporations.
- Cloud providers are massive companies with revenues exceeding the GDP of many countries, making their outages a different kind of risk compared to small, fragile projects.
- The original comic highlights the fragility of small, often single-maintainer open-source projects that underpin much of modern technology.
- Examples of such critical one-maintainer projects include ImageMagick (Dirk Lemstra), XZ (Lasse Collin), cURL (Daniel Stenberg), and VIM (Bram Moolenaar).
- These maintainers often work without compensation, and their projects deserve recognition and support.
- The misapplication of the comic to cloud outages overlooks the real issue: the reliance on a few large companies rather than the fragility of small projects.
- Some online communities understand the distinction, while others have taken the joke to absurd extremes, diluting its original meaning.