Many of us don't even know it. My DNS for PortableApps.com is run through Digital Ocean, which uses Cloudflare for DNS.
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”
#42That 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…
The bigger problem is that technology advancements gravitate at the demands of the noisiest, with the most social gravity.
Yes there are a lot of smart people at FAANG and Cloudflare corp.
There are a lot of just as capable folks not driven by job addicted meme.
Technically there’s no reason the web couldn’t be replaced with 1:many via Wireshark key sharing based access control to local content.
But via Wall Street, along these very particular rules, is how we are told to trade information. How is that not a planned economy?
Not just by doing what we’re clearly interested in doing naturally.
Make no mistake: big corp isn’t making us login at gunpoint. “They” didn’t do this. “We” did this.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#43Honest question: I've never really understood the back of the napkin math of how Cloudflare functions economically, which I feel would go a long way towards my understanding of why/how they were able to become such an integral and generally positive part of the Internet.
Did they have some crazy in to get cheap bandwidth? Did they bet big on bandwidth prices falling? Did they figure something else out that nobody saw? Do they just to a tremendous job of migrating sites from free to paid plans?
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#44Didn'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.
That's not actually a contradiction. When an individual website is considered as a system, it will have multiple points where the failure of a component inhibits the system. It's possible to have both cloudflare and your database as "SPoFs" and that "single" is not meant to imply everyone only gets one.
It's absolutely true that if us-east-1 in AWS has a bad day, a significant fraction of the American digital economy will shut down. For some companies, the same is true of Azure and Google's various comparable offerings.
I read your post as skeptical. Why would you be skeptical? If you care about keeping your product up, you absolutely should have a fallback for cloudflare if you're a customer of theirs. Now, you might not care (and actually, for most folks I submit you need not care), but the folks making sure Ambulances get timely push notifications and realtime driving instructions probably care quite a bit.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#45Didn'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
Doubly ironic since in doing this, they created a system where a protocol is the SPoF; namely nonsensical or false BGP advertisements can quickly kill the internet as a whole if done correctly.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#46Didn'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.
A "single point of failure" doesn't mean there's only one of them. It means the whole fails when the SPOF fails. But you can have many of them.
A steel chain made of links has as many SPOF as links.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#47It'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.
I meant the "CDN with a meaningful free tier" part of the business model. That's why "half the internet" has CF as a single point of failure.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#48Interesting 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…
From TFA:
> The only requirement to use Proactive Nameservers is that we have to be your registrar, because we need to connect to the registry to update your nameserver delegation.
So I guess technically this could be achieved with an API for your domain settings.
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#49Honest question: I've never really understood the back of the napkin math of how Cloudflare functions economically, which I feel would go a long way towards my understanding of why/how they were able to become such an integral and generally positive part of the Internet. Did they have some crazy in to get cheap bandwidth? Did they bet big on bandwidth prices falling? Did they figure something else out that nobody saw…
Read our S-1, it's all in there.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...
Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”
#50Now that Cloudflare is also a registrar, they could pretty easily implement a nameserver failover like EasyDNS. I hope this event underscores the importance of that to them.
It's worth noting Cloudflare also supports secondary DNS, but only for enterprise customers: https://blog.cloudflare.com/secondary-dns-a-faster-more-resi...