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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”

#181

Post by hinkley »

crazygringo wrote: post #119

I guess this is off-topic, but the stock photo they're using is cracking me up . Guy at work... coffee cup on a tablet he's using for a coaster ... except he's also drinking whiskey from a beautiful crystal glass... there's a folded paper airplane... there's just so much to unpack here, it's pretty hilarious.

> except he's also drinking whiskey from a beautiful crystal glass

And he has left the stopper off of the decanter like some sort of animal.

I think we are supposed to believe that the person here was just dicking around online, fiddling with paper, finishing his morning coffee, when all of a sudden he gets an email asking if anyone knows what's going on with the website.

So he stops what he was (not) doing, puts down his coffee, and starts poking around. At which point he realizes he needs something stronger than coffee. As he is pouring his glass he is confronted with the true horror of the situation, drops the stopper on the floor and just holds his face wondering why the Universe hates him.

I wonder if we can get JJ Abrams to option the movie rights.

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

#182

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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.

> There's always a line

This is where you've gone wrong.

There isn't always a line, some businesses are in the business of selling products and services and not in the business of policing content. And if some of their customers are pedophiles or the like then have the police arrest the pedophiles and leave the fry cooks and gas station attendants out of it, even if the pedophiles eat food and drive cars.

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

#185

Post by swayson »

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…

I enjoyed the analogy to gardening. Made me think of the terrific principles portrayed in the book The timeless way of building.

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

#186

Post by black_puppydog »

What I find really shocking is the abundant use of CF on piracy websites of all things. Not the serious ones of course, SciHub and library genesis are mirrored differently.

But a lot of small torrent websites and such simply won't load without JS and specifically CF code. It's pretty crazy. Luckily I don't use any of those bEcAuSe IlLeGaL but still, I find it really depressing, especially when webtorrent, IPFS etc are available, and frankly many of those pages will never have to bear a load that makes CF a requirement.

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

#187

Post by AnthonyMouse »

theptip wrote: post #178
david-cako wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, however at AWS at least, customers are specifically told "multi-cloud doesn't allow you to fully leverage the benefits of AWS", whatever that means. It makes sense that cloud companies are inclined to keep customers from giving money to competitors, but they way they sell it and structure services, reserved instances, and enterprise discounts is such that you basically are putting all of your eggs in one basket…

> "multi-cloud doesn't allow you to fully leverage the benefits of AWS", whatever that means. One of the selling points of cloud providers is managed services like SQS. If you run a multi-cloud architecture, you either can't use managed services, or have to build abstraction layers on top of them (and only use the features that exist in both cloud providers' versions of the managed service). If you want to use a mana…

> If you run a multi-cloud architecture, you either can't use managed services, or have to build abstraction layers on top of them (and only use the features that exist in both cloud providers' versions of the managed service).

And this is, of course, why they do everything they can do discourage it. Because if you do that, not only are you not reliant on them for availability, you can switch more of your business to the other provider(s) based on current pricing, and they do not want that big time.

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

#188

Post by jdc0589 »

black_puppydog wrote: post #186

What I find really shocking is the abundant use of CF on piracy websites of all things. Not the serious ones of course, SciHub and library genesis are mirrored differently. But a lot of small torrent websites and such simply won't load without JS and specifically CF code. It's pretty crazy. Luckily I don't use any of those bEcAuSe IlLeGaL but still, I find it really depressing, especially when webtorrent, IPFS etc ar…

its not about caching or handling normal traffic. its about ddos protection. sites like that are frequent targets.

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

#189

Post by jniedrauer »

0xEFF wrote: post #160
jonplackett wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do a fallback from cloudflare failing when they’re your dns provider too? Any redirection around would take too long to change wouldn’t it? They’d be back up and running before it was implemented. What’s the right approach?

Don't use them for DNS, just point 60 second TTL A records at them.

Where do you put your DNS servers? On-prem is going to be less reliable than cloudflare which has a 100% uptime SLA. I doubt your local ops team can compete.

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

#190

Post by contingencies »

twblalock wrote: post #145
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.

The problem is customers choosing to put all their eggs in one basket.

Until relatively recently absolutely none, and now almost none of the tooling allows effective multi-cloud or hybrid cloud/private.

Basically the cloud providers work very hard to prevent the commodification of their services with special incompatible service offerings, lock-in, interdependency, deep and opaque APIs for integration, and networks of training and certification that position change as a direct threat to people's job security.

Cloud providers today are basically Microsoft in the 90s.

Much as open source challenged Microsoft, I would say that the world now needs open infrastructure tooling that positions hybrid and multi-cloud as first class infrastructure architectural cases in order to displace established cloud provider hegemony. Even then we will have to fight the hardware and real estate economies of scale available to large established cloud providers.

I wrote some observations about this space based significantly on HN community comments prior to the rise of Docker a few years ago: http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/ ... click 'original' ... the conclusions still seem timely.

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