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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”

#141

Post by FireBeyond »

mfkp wrote: post #55
saagarjha wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Many DNS providers have the ability to do AXFR "zone transfers", so you can sync your records to a secondary provider and you would add a secondary set of nameservers for redundancy. Unfortunately Cloudflare doesn't offer this unless you pay for their Enterprise plan (they started offering it earlier this year). I do love using CloudFlare for DNS, lots of great features and generally works well, but I wish they would…

Back in the day (I haven't run my own mail server for years and years) there was a company called Secondary MX.

That's all they did. They weren't a mail host or provider, there was no UI, nothing. All they did was allow you to specify them as, well, a secondary MX, so if you were offline they'd cache your inbound email until you were back. Simple. Efficient.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#142

Post by Spivak »

itsangaris wrote: post #87
Justsignedup wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is: Can we do better? A natural monopoly is a good thing. It just means that the natural monopoly needs to build its own redundancy. Cloudflare total failure isn't common.

I wouldn't classify a natural monopoly as a good thing. It mostly signifies high barriers to entry for competitors and a market that's more susceptible to failure, as seen here.

I guess but there's not really a shortage of commercial CDNs. A market with lots of competitors but a clear winner says more about consumer preference and network (ha!) effects than it does about Cloudflare's moat.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#143

Post by FireBeyond »

citizenpaul wrote: post #118

I love all the comments about fail-over for DDOS/DNS protection. What is your budget? Well we are looking at around $0.00 for our maximum allowance. Ok so single point of failure it is I guess we are done here. Companies only say they care when there is a problem, the reality is that they dont.

Precisely. I remember when the CEO of my old company came to me and said (with respect to moving from a on-prem model to SaaS), "What's our SLA going to be?"

"Well, what do you want it to be?"

Give me a number and I'll tell you how much it will cost and how long it will take to get there.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#144

Post by everfree »

surround wrote: post #121

Instead of trusting any DNS provider with your queries, I recommend running your own recursive resolver with Unbound. https://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/

But then aren't you just trusting your VPS provider or ISP instead?

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#145

Post by twblalock »

drawkbox wrote: post #13

That 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…

There is no CDN monopoly. There are several to choose from. Cloudflare is one of the new kids on the block.

There is no cloud monopoly either. Customers can choose from AWS, GCP, Azure, and several others.

The problem is not market concentration. There are plenty of options. The problem is customers choosing to put all their eggs in one basket.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#147

Post by Spivak »

modo_mario wrote: post #93
Justsignedup wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is: Can we do better? A natural monopoly is a good thing. It just means that the natural monopoly needs to build its own redundancy. Cloudflare total failure isn't common.

> A natural monopoly is a good thing. How so?

If you have a "monopoly" which is this case just means you're the market leader by a wide margin, but in theory this could mean near total control of a market but the reason you have this total control is because your customers choose to buy from you over your competitors simply because you're better and or cheaper then this is a good thing. Customers are getting what they want. And the market leader in this situation will have a hard time abusing their position because any they'll have competitors nipping at their heels if they slip up.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#148

Post by mrsalt »

gripfx wrote: post #71
JohnTHaller wrote: post #41

Many of us don't even know it. My DNS for PortableApps.com is run through Digital Ocean, which uses Cloudflare for DNS.

On an unrelated note. Thank you so much for PortableApps.com! It was invaluable at university when studying in the library. To this day, I still use it for utilities that don't need to be installed on my desktop.

I am also grateful for PortableApps.com. Along with Scoop and Homebrew, they make using a system without root or admin privileges a really nice experience, in both Windows and Linux.

My sincere thanks to John and all the PortableApps.com contributors.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#149

Post by nemothekid »

Justsignedup wrote: post #61
drawkbox wrote: post #13

That 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 question is: Can we do better? A natural monopoly is a good thing. It just means that the natural monopoly needs to build its own redundancy. Cloudflare total failure isn't common.

Cloudflare isn't a monopoly. Cloudflare doesn't even have a particularly strong moat when compared to Fastly or Akamai. Cloudflare doesn't even have any network effects.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#150

Post by frandroid »

jonny_eh wrote: post #128
transpostmeta wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There's always a line, and therefore, I'm ok with drawing the line at Nazis.

slow clap for HNers downvoting this and the parent answer...
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