Ask HN: How does Cloudflare deals with their hardware?

#1

Post by linkpuff » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

I was here thinking... So cloudflare does ddos protection, right? So they must get alot of damaged hardware(because of hard and damaging attacks) How do they deal with it? Throw it all on trash? Reuse it for less powerful demands? Give the usable(but not for their tier) away?

Re: Ask HN: How does Cloudflare deals with their hardware?

#2

Post by detaro » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

network packets don't cause hardware damage...

Re: Ask HN: How does Cloudflare deals with their hardware?

#3

Post by linkpuff » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #2

network packets don't cause hardware damage...

well I dont think so... because when they(cloudflare) are being attacked, at least the networking boards get spammed,and get hot, ending with damage

Re: Ask HN: How does Cloudflare deals with their hardware?

#4

Post by NikolaNovak » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

I do not believe network protection,in this context, works in same ways a physical protection,e.g. Armour.

Network hardware properly designed to withstand certain kinds of attacks will not be physically damaged by their use. Put another way,a piece of hardware that withstands (has capacity for) X number of transactions per second will no more get damaged if it is discarding vs processing them.

This is not to say there's no way to damage hardware with software but I don't believe the question is that generic.

Re: Ask HN: How does Cloudflare deals with their hardware?

#5

Post by jgrahamc » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

We don't have attacks that damage hardware. We do have disks that wear out. We secure erase them and then have them physically destroyed. I cannot think of an instance where we've had to replace a network card because of DDoS damage.

Re: Ask HN: How does Cloudflare deals with their hardware?

#6

Post by NikolaNovak » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

NikolaNovak wrote: post #4

I do not believe network protection,in this context, works in same ways a physical protection,e.g. Armour. Network hardware properly designed to withstand certain kinds of attacks will not be physically damaged by their use. Put another way,a piece of hardware that withstands (has capacity for) X number of transactions per second will no more get damaged if it is discarding vs processing them. This is not to say ther…

Further,a successful ddos attack does not necessarily do physical damage.it succeeds by overwhelming the recipient's ability to deal with requests. Thus can cause large amount of "damage" to software systems and underlying business through outages etc,but again,not necessarily any physical damage per se.