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CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

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Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#61

Post by api »

nly wrote: post #58
api wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem does CloudFlare really solve except for DDOS?

Latency, although you can solve that through any number of CDN solutions.

That can be solved by using a cloud service with global POPs, spinning up nodes everywhere, and using a common core config built with Chef, Puppet, or Docker. Amazon, Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, Joyent/Triton, and probably a half dozen others will provide global presence with instant provisioning.

Slightly more work but you control it. Cost is probably similar.

DDOS mitigation is harder and is definitely something CloudFlare does well enough to earn some market share, but wouldn't it be nice if we had a more global solution to this problem that didn't involve third party firewalls?

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#62

Post by shazow »

arihant wrote: post #45
chinathrow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those spambots hit hard these days. However, they never ever touch your origin or your CDN at all (check your logs, nothing). They fake the log entry directly into the Analytics systems. Google has to cleanup, but sadly, they haven't moved a bit since ages.

Yes, that is true. However, the fact that only my cloudflare domains experience this suggests either, 1. They are targeting domains specifically with cloudflare nameservers. 2. They are somehow obtaining a list of domains running on cloudflare. Both these tasks are not hard to accomplish. And it is extremely irritating.

Most of these spammers just emit events to a large range of GA tracking ids completely blindly, think of it as the equivalent of...

    for (var i=0; i
They do that a bunch of times per day from a bunch of different IP addresses. Adding host filtering to your properties on GA eliminates about 80% of spam which use this technique.

It's possible you're being targeted due to being in a specific market or something, but it's unlikely to be related to Cloudflare. (At least I can't think of any reason why it would be related.)

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#63

Post by verelo »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #28
verelo wrote: post #18

I want to love CloudFlare, I really do. We currently use them, but sadly the number of times that CloudFlare has been the cause of a service interruption is somewhere around 50% mark. They are no longer in use on any critical/important end points, I just don't need PagerDuty waking us up over an issue I have no control over. This is not a problem I expect to improve. As they start to cover all of the web, i imagine t…

Would you mind posting the types of problems you've had? I use CF for many critical websites I manage and haven't noticed any problems.

Timeouts are the majority of the issues, when our service is running perfectly fine otherwise.

They have often been short, but sometimes long enough to cause me to sit there and flip DNS for various end points away from them until the issue is resolved.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#64

Post by verelo »

jgrahamc wrote: post #23
verelo wrote: post #18

I want to love CloudFlare, I really do. We currently use them, but sadly the number of times that CloudFlare has been the cause of a service interruption is somewhere around 50% mark. They are no longer in use on any critical/important end points, I just don't need PagerDuty waking us up over an issue I have no control over. This is not a problem I expect to improve. As they start to cover all of the web, i imagine t…

I would love to talk to you about this. jgc @ guess the domain.

Happy to chat, feel free to drop me a note. andrew at checkout51.com

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#65

Post by zo1 »

chinathrow wrote: post #43
arihant wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your... And this: https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/07/malicious-google-analytics-r... I and others that I know get this kind of referral spam on every single domain we have with cloudflare. I know DNS records are public, but is there something cloudflare and other public DNS hosting services can do to prevent this?

Those spambots hit hard these days. However, they never ever touch your origin or your CDN at all (check your logs, nothing). They fake the log entry directly into the Analytics systems. Google has to cleanup, but sadly, they haven't moved a bit since ages.

Do you have any insight as to why those spambots would do that? The only thing I can think of is SEO for the "referral" domain, so that they boost their own domain's ranking.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#66

Post by chipperyman573 »

chrissnell wrote: post #59
bduerst wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if you think ISPs should block ISIS websites, domains, and IP addresses.

It should be entirely up to the ISP. Consequently, the ISP's customers can judge (with their spending) whether they approve of such blocking.

No they can't, at least not in America.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#67

Post by Zirro »

chrissnell wrote: post #55
verelo wrote: post #18

I want to love CloudFlare, I really do. We currently use them, but sadly the number of times that CloudFlare has been the cause of a service interruption is somewhere around 50% mark. They are no longer in use on any critical/important end points, I just don't need PagerDuty waking us up over an issue I have no control over. This is not a problem I expect to improve. As they start to cover all of the web, i imagine t…

I tried their enterprise tier out about 9 months ago and was entirely unimpressed. Moving a site from Akamai -> CF increased page load times dramatically. We ended up quickly switching back. CloudFlare's complicity with ISIS, however, was what turned me off permanently. For those unaware, CloudFlare was providing proxy shielding of ISIS's propaganda websites. The CF CEO publicly refused to discontinue their service,…

What would you prefer their policy on censorship be? Though I was unaware of CloudFlare and this situation, I believe that one compromise can easily lead to a slippery slope.

How do you see protocols (bittorrent or ipfs, for example) where content can not be removed as long as someone has a copy - are we better off without their existence in your opinion?

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#68

Post by mtgx »

chrissnell wrote: post #55
verelo wrote: post #18

I want to love CloudFlare, I really do. We currently use them, but sadly the number of times that CloudFlare has been the cause of a service interruption is somewhere around 50% mark. They are no longer in use on any critical/important end points, I just don't need PagerDuty waking us up over an issue I have no control over. This is not a problem I expect to improve. As they start to cover all of the web, i imagine t…

I tried their enterprise tier out about 9 months ago and was entirely unimpressed. Moving a site from Akamai -> CF increased page load times dramatically. We ended up quickly switching back. CloudFlare's complicity with ISIS, however, was what turned me off permanently. For those unaware, CloudFlare was providing proxy shielding of ISIS's propaganda websites. The CF CEO publicly refused to discontinue their service,…

That's doesn't sound much different than UK asking Facebook and Google to censor "extremist speech" on their platforms.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#69

Post by billyhoffman »

kevingadd wrote: post #50
verelo wrote: post #18

I want to love CloudFlare, I really do. We currently use them, but sadly the number of times that CloudFlare has been the cause of a service interruption is somewhere around 50% mark. They are no longer in use on any critical/important end points, I just don't need PagerDuty waking us up over an issue I have no control over. This is not a problem I expect to improve. As they start to cover all of the web, i imagine t…

I used CloudFlare for a while and it consistently caused more problems than it solved. Really hard to debug, too. Injecting broken JS into pages, serving up corrupted cached assets, etc. Better to just pay for Amazon CloudFront or something and set it all up myself...

Those errors are usually caused by CloudFlare automatic Front-end Optimization (FEO) stuff, like trying to losslessly optimize images, add cache control, gzip, SPDY/HTTP2, etc. It used to be a primary marketing point, and while its still there (and still causing problems) they have moved away from promoting it so much.

Its best to use of them as a CDN, DDoS sink, and SSL. Their other stuff like FEO or their web app firewall stuff really isn't that impressive enough to be considered a reason for switching.

Disclaimer: I work in the web performance space, and used to work in the web security space. As a whole I'm not a fan of the "stick a magic appliance in front of a website to automatically stop [web security issues | web performance problems]" approach, whether from CloudFlare or otherwise.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#70

Post by lost_my_pwd »

chrissnell wrote: post #55
verelo wrote: post #18

I want to love CloudFlare, I really do. We currently use them, but sadly the number of times that CloudFlare has been the cause of a service interruption is somewhere around 50% mark. They are no longer in use on any critical/important end points, I just don't need PagerDuty waking us up over an issue I have no control over. This is not a problem I expect to improve. As they start to cover all of the web, i imagine t…

I tried their enterprise tier out about 9 months ago and was entirely unimpressed. Moving a site from Akamai -> CF increased page load times dramatically. We ended up quickly switching back. CloudFlare's complicity with ISIS, however, was what turned me off permanently. For those unaware, CloudFlare was providing proxy shielding of ISIS's propaganda websites. The CF CEO publicly refused to discontinue their service,…

Interesting. This is the first I have heard of this and CloudFlare's reputation has just gone up my eyes because of it.

Is ISIS dangerous and deplorable? Sure. Are there ideas so dangerous that they do not deserve to be exposed to public discourse and judged on their merits? I don't think so.

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