How did Logic+Magic cope with the global tech crash?
On the 19th July, I.T. workers all over the world scrambled to resolve issues resulting from a faulty automated update. Airports, banks and healthcare providers all fell victim to the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, in an event that has been described as the biggest crash of all time. However, for me and the other developers at Logic+Magic, it was just another day, and were it not for the resulting media frenzy, I might not even have noticed.
We experienced no drama. The reason we were able to escape relatively unscathed is that the servers we use for our applications run Linux, not any variant of Windows. This is nothing special, of course. Estimates of Linux's market share of the web vary wildly - for reasons of security it's not in a website's interest to make it obvious what operating system it's using - but you will see stats claiming that over 90% of web servers run on Linux.
The benefit of Linux
The websites we build are constructed on a range of software frameworks - Drupal, WordPress, Ruby on Rails, even good old-fashioned flat HTML if that's the best tool for the job. If we really wanted to, we could run all of these on Windows servers. But there's a consensus that this would be an odd way to do things. Hosting companies will let you commission a Windows server, but this will come at a price - Windows is, of course, a commercial venture, whereas Linux is open source.
Given that Linux is free, well maintained, secure, versatile and so on, why would anyone want to use Windows? Well, the CrowdStrike incident can give us a few clues. Many of the affected organisations were older, established brands, who have had significant I.T. needs for decades. As such, they will have chosen Windows (in collaboration with the developers of their services) at a time when it was the only realistic option. And after a certain point, changing to a different operating system isn't going to make financial sense.
The process by which technologies thrive or die is Darwinian in nature, and it would be both futile and counter-productive to try and steer the whole world towards Linux. But wherever we can, we at Logic+Magic can try and make things a bit easier for ourselves and our clients.
At this point in the blog-writing process, my research turned up a rather surprising twist. Any guesses? I'll give you a hint - it relates to my hubris (and, to be frank, smugness) regarding Linux.
As this article on neowin.net reports, this Windows incident was not the first time CrowdStrike had failed to QA its releases properly. An update earlier this year had caused similar outages - but on Linux.
Follow-up investigations revealed that CrowdStrike had not included Debian in its test matrix, but had pushed updates to systems running on Debian. For context, Debian is the distribution of Linux that underpins Ubuntu, the most popular variant of Linux. Without wishing to speculate further, that sounds bad.
So, that's me suitably humbled. There are several take-home messages from this: Don't assume tech service providers know what they're doing. Think carefully before giving full access to your systems to a third party. And, tempting though it may be, don't think you're safe just because you're running Linux.
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