If only DDOS attacks were taken seriously and their perpetrators punished accordingly (and maybe if the network had better ways of self-defense) instead of companies and websites having to fend for themselves.
Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
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Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#12Okay here's the thing. I'm okay with people bashing other (competing) companies when they do wrong. However, I believe it is somewhat childish and uncalled for to bash another company, because of a mistake. First of all "I use easyDNS so I didn't notice it at all tbh" is not only a childish assertion, it's borderline a falsehood. You DO NOT offer the same services, nor the same scale. (No, VOD would not work if your…
Honestly I didn't notice the domain name, and I actually thought the author was being quite understanding by saying things like "This is inevitable and unavoidable and entirely excusable. Everybody blows up, every DNS provider in existence will experience downtime. No exceptions." and that they use Cloudflare themselves.
This is obviously subjective, but to me it didn't come across as "they suck use us" but rather pointing out the inherent flaws in this quite popular SPOF and cautioning to avoid it.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#13That is the problem with massive centralization even if it is market level and internally Cloudflare (or any other big fish) does decentralization/fail-over of their own. Many of these companies should have had fail-over to competitors at least for reliability.
The problem with near market monopolization, oligopoly, even the singularity, the fail-case is catastrophic and may even wipe out decentralized, diffused, dispersed, decoupled system solutions that can't make it due to so much relative size from the big fish that it squashes them along the way. The bigger the ship the longer it takes to turn.
This Cloudflare issue is like the recent Facebook SDK startup crashes where everyone has a single point of failure on Facebook SDK where people should be using or able to use the OpenGraph API directly as they need which is more robust to the app that uses it, it won't crash on startup.
In business it is a goal to centralize to grow, in nature and robust systems it is more differentiation and decentralization to survive. There will always be a push and pull between these two forces.
Systems and markets are like gardens. The garden must be maintained, new seeds planted and helped to grow from small to mid-sized, mid-sized plants the bulk of the garden, and then the larger plants need to be culled back when they get too big to not take the mid-sized and then all the resources from the new seeds/small plants. The problem is we have allowed the top end to take over the garden and when they fail they fail spectacularly. The bigger the scale the bigger they can fail.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#14This is just an advertisement for easydns.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#15It's interesting to me that Cloudflare doesn't really have any competition with a similar business model. I suppose the free plan requires quite a lot of spending before the upgrades offset it.
There are other large CDNs like Akamai. They just don't compete with Cloudflare in the consumer sector. It probably doesn't matter for them because enterprise contracts are where all the money is at.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#16[deleted]
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#17Is it realistic for a small-medium sized business to have more than one DNS provider?
> Is it realistic for a small-medium sized business to have more than one DNS provider?
Yes: as the weblog post points out, you can have EasyDNS as your master with their multiple DNS servers, and then also have (e.g.) Route53 slaved to EasyDNS and have those in addition to EasyDNS in your records.
DNS servers have had replication for decades.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#18If only DDOS attacks were taken seriously and their perpetrators punished accordingly (and maybe if the network had better ways of self-defense) instead of companies and websites having to fend for themselves (or having to resort to solutions like Cloudflare).
I am not sure I understand this comment, in the context- cloudflare misconfigured some routes and it was quickly resolved. was this a DDoS?
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#19I am not sure, if I would trust anyone who misuses the term "Single-Point-of-Failure" on matters of reliability.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#20Is it realistic for a small-medium sized business to have more than one DNS provider?
It's easy enough if you sign up with a DNS provider provider.