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Cloudflare was down

cloudflarestatus.com

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Re: Cloudflare was down

#461

Post by pwdisswordfish2 »

snazz wrote: post #265
blisseyGo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, done HN use any CDN or other way of DDOS protection? dang?

Don't think so. They used to use Cloudflare but stopped. To my knowledge, it's a single server without a database (using the filesystem as a database).

"They used to use Cloudflare but stopped."

They are still using Cloudflare. Unlike CF, M5 does not require SNI.

   curl --resolve news.ycombinator.com:443:104.20.43.44 https://news.ycombinator.com

Re: Cloudflare was down

#462

Post by katbyte »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #404
blhack wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Holy crap I am thinking either there is some magic or everything we are doing in the modern web are wrong. Spin up an apache installation and see how many requests you can serve per second if you're just serving static files off of an SSD. It's a lot. edit: I see that there are already a bunch of other comments to this effect. I think you're comment is really going to bring out the old timers, haha. From my perspect…

>* From my perspective, the "modern web" is absolutely insane. * Agreed. I was brought up as a computer systems engineer... So, not a scientist, but I always worked with the basic premise of keep it simple. I've worked on projects where we built all the fangled clustering and master/slave (sorry to the PC crowd, but that's what it was called) stuff but never once needed it in practice. Our stuff could easily handle s…

> master/slave

That is what it _was_ called, it doesn’t have to be going forward.

Re: Cloudflare was down

#463

Post by cortesoft »

lima wrote: post #419
cortesoft wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true... you can certainly do redundant dns with automatic failover between providers. Just set up NS records pointing to different providers.

That's not easy, you need to set up replication.

Seems worth doing

Re: Cloudflare was down

#464

Post by johncolanduoni »

dijit wrote: post #451
macNchz wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the major cloud infrastructure providers have had outages of varying severity at one point or another...it's something you'd want to take into account for, say, a system that remote controls life-critical devices, but likely isn't worth the engineering time and added complexity for a productivity or social app with a small userbase. Working on many of the latter over the years I've generally said "well if {major…

>"well if {major cloud provider} is down, the internet is going to be all messed up for a bit anyway, so we'll accept the risk of being down when they're down, and reassess whether that keeps making sense as we grow." This is a very common pattern and falls into the 'nobody got fired for buying cisco/microsoft/intel' trap. I have two issues with it; 1) It entrenches the largest provider. You would not extend the same…

The trust you have to give AWS or other cloud providers is not that different than the trust you give any number of vendors (email service, phone service, etc.). You have a contract with them that says they won’t do those things, and if they ever get caught doing them all the on-premise enterprise they’re spending a lot of effort on getting on board will dry up instantly.

Amazon can copy your business model just fine without looking at your servers. Most of what’s on your servers is probably irrelevant from their perspective.

Re: Cloudflare was down

#465

Post by fapjacks »

encom wrote: post #432
michel-slm wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freenode's IRC servers were down which was unexpected for me. I was expecting old-school communication networks to not have a dependency on Cloudflare.

I've had no connection interruptions to the three IRC networks I'm connected to. Freenode, EFnet and Hackint. I loathe Discord, and I can barely contain myself with schadenfreude at this news.

I also had no issues connecting to a few different networks, including Freenode and EFnet.

Re: Cloudflare was down

#466

Post by afuchs »

outworlder wrote: post #427
nickjj wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Holy crap I am thinking either there is some magic or everything we are doing in the modern web are wrong. It doesn't need to be crazy. A static site on DigitalOcean's $5 / month plan using nginx will happily serve that type of traffic. The author of https://gorails.com hosts his entire Rails video platform app on a $20 / month DO server. The average CPU load is 2% and half the memory on the server is free. The ide…

> The idea that you need some globally redundant Kubernetes cluster with auto fail-over capabilities seems to be popular but in practice it's totally not necessary in so many cases True, but this is why it shouldn't be bashed either. When you need it, you need it (cue very complex enterprise applications with SLA requirements).

> True, but this is why it shouldn't be bashed either. When you need it, you need it (cue very complex enterprise applications with SLA requirements).

To support this, look at how many people criticize Kubernetes as being too focused on what huge companies need instead of what their small company needs. Kubernetes still has its place, but some peoples expectations may be misplaced.

For a side project, or anything low traffic with low reliability requirements, a simple VPS or share hosting suffices. Wordpress and PHP are still massively popular despite React and Node.js existing. Someone who runs a site off of shared hosting with Wordpress can have a very different vision about what their business/sideproject/etc will accomplish compared to someone who writes a custom application with a "modern" stack.

Re: Cloudflare was down

#467

Post by dboreham »

ksec wrote: post #331
snazz wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think so. They used to use Cloudflare but stopped. To my knowledge, it's a single server without a database (using the filesystem as a database).

So HN is serving 5.5M page view daily (excluding API access ) on a single server without CDN and without a database? Holy crap I am thinking either there is some magic or everything we are doing in the modern web are wrong. Edit: The number is from Dang [1] > These days around 5.5M page views daily and something like 5M unique readers a month, depending on how you try to count them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/i…

Everything we're doing is wrong.

Re: Cloudflare was down

#468

Post by tylerhou »

viraptor wrote: post #429
ci5er wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike Reddit, logged in and logged out users largely see the same thing. I wouldn't imagine there is much logic involved in serving personalized pages, when they don't care who you are.

The username is embedded in the page, so you can't do full caching unfortunately. But the whole content could be easily cached and concatenated to header/footer.

You also can't do that every time because of hidden, flagged, showdead, etc.

Re: Cloudflare was down

#469

Post by thinkloop »

m0xte wrote: post #358
ksec wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So HN is serving 5.5M page view daily (excluding API access ) on a single server without CDN and without a database? Holy crap I am thinking either there is some magic or everything we are doing in the modern web are wrong. Edit: The number is from Dang [1] > These days around 5.5M page views daily and something like 5M unique readers a month, depending on how you try to count them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/i…

Modern web is a completely broken mess. We were serving around that traffic off a single dual pentium 3 in 2002 quite happily off IIS/SQL Server/ASP. The amount of information presented has not grown either. That little box had some top tier brand main corporate web sites on it too and was pumping out 30-40 requests a second peak. There was no CDN.

You were not serving that traffic, you were just serving your core functionality - no tracking, no analytics, no ads, no a/b, no dark mode, no social login, no responsiveness. Are most of those shitty? Sure, just let me know when you figure out how to pry a penny from your users for all your hard work.

Re: Cloudflare was down

#470

Post by post-it »

mjlawson wrote: post #137
Jasper_ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the status page is so you can point to it for your five nines SLA and go "look? we were only down for one hour". As soon as the money relies on the metric, the metric will reflect the money.

Goodhart's Law[1] in action. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I've noticed everyone posts links in footnotes, is that just Hacker News etiquette?
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