Didn't people also say the same thing about AWS a while back when that had a downtime? I guess the internet has multiple "Single-Point-Of-Failure"s.
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”
#32Didn't people also say the same thing about AWS a while back when that had a downtime? I guess the internet has multiple "Single-Point-Of-Failure"s.
Ironic since the internet (ARPANET) was specifically designed to not have a single point of failure
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 po…
I think the root cause (which, IMO, you correctly point out) is lost on many modern developers. For whatever reason there's this modern idea that if a company A is paying money to company B for a service, that company B will handle all the 'hard stuff' for them. The end result is we have a lot of applications/infra built with SPOFs, in some cases known, but in many, swept under the rug and abstracted away to passing…
"Your app will go down when half the Internet goes down" is not that big of a deal to most software companies, because:
1. no one's going to blame me if my app goes down when half the Internet is also down but they are going to blame me if my custom solution to the same thing causes an outage,
2. there's no way my custom solution is going to achieve the same uptime. AWS/Cloudflare/Azure are not perfect, but whatever I roll for myself is almost certainly going to be much less perfect.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#34That 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, dis…
> Many of these companies should have had fail-over to competitors at least for reliability.
How would you even set such a thing up? I fear that you might get a couple of collusionary companies that bail each other out and smaller providers might just be left out to dry…
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#35What's funny about this outage is I'm sure many of of us (myself included) used this window to analyze large services and determine an increase in major Cloudflare customers and presumably, revenue. Even ISPs like T-Mobile faced issues due to the Cloudflare outage! The situation has exposed just how critical Cloudflare is.
I went ahead and bought calls ahead of NET earnings next month. Cloudflare is becoming an increasingly bigger part of the internet backbone. Purely speculating here, but I wouldn't put it past AWS or another large player acquiring them soon.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#36Interesting perspective, but it seems like this is just an ad for easyDNS and their "Proactive Nameservers," though I couldn't imagine a better time than the misstep of a behemoth of a competitor in this space. Not to detract from the more important discussion about the internet's dependence on Cloudflare overall.
It may be just an ad for easyDNS' Proactive Nameservers [1] product but it provides a roadmap for one possible solution to this type of problem. From a quick reading of the marketing info, the solution can be summarized as "Provision, Monitor, and Fail-Over DNS Name Servers across multiple DNS-as-a-Service providers". The question I have is whether the following constraint is artificially introduced or not:
> We must be your domain registrar for this to work...
IIRC, Netflix OSS published some tools quite some time ago to support multiple DNS providers but I don't know/remember if they tackled the availability problem. The question comes down to build vs buy and whether the solution is general enough to warrant an Open Source Software solution.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#37This is just an advertisement for easydns.
Bingo. Still a good read, and easydns is just trying to profit over a screw-up from a competitor, but still essentially an ad.
> but still essentially an ad.
Compared to the endless content marketing Cloudflare posts [1]? It's an ad, but they're still right. That's just good content marketing (informative, relevant, and perhaps you buy something because of it).
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#38It'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.
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Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#39What's funny about this outage is I'm sure many of of us (myself included) used this window to analyze large services and determine an increase in major Cloudflare customers and presumably, revenue. Even ISPs like T-Mobile faced issues due to the Cloudflare outage! The situation has exposed just how critical Cloudflare is. I went ahead and bought calls ahead of NET earnings next month. Cloudflare is becoming an incre…
> I wouldn't put it past AWS or another large player acquiring them soon.
I really hope it doesn't come to this sadly. I'd be okay with DO or somebody who isn't as massive doing a merger. Maybe they can pull resources to make each other even successful and maintaining reasonable independence.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#40It'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.
Sucuri seem to have pretty similar business model, which is a proxy in front of your site that handle security and cdn.