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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”

#191

Post by black_puppydog »

jdc0589 wrote: post #188
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.

and there should be enough of them that that shouldn't matter.

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

#193

Post by hinkley »

High availability is an insurance game, and perhaps we need to start treating it that way.

Rather than admitting that your customers need to maintain a business relationship with your competitors, you need to admit you need to maintain a business relationship with your competitors. That we need a moral equivalent of underwriting in the cloud space.

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

#194

Post by abtinf »

contingencies wrote: post #190
twblalock wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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

Until relatively recently, the cloud didn't exist.

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

#195

Post by snowwrestler »

henriquez wrote: post #68
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #43

Honest 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…

Cloudflare is a relatively cheap "lite CDN" for developers who want caching without putting in any work. This becomes a gateway drug for Cloudflare's more expensive plans once you outgrow the free plan. It quickly adds up; I worked for a company that wasn't even on an enterprise plan and was spending hundreds of dollars a month on Cloudflare just because they had a lot of domains. My reservation with Cloudflare is th…

Unless you're sending all your traffic back to physical machines that you own locked into a cage in a datacenter, you are probably letting someone MITM your SSL traffic. For example if you are hosting on AWS, Amazon has access to your keys. If you are hosting on a hardware server leased from Hetzner, Hetzner has access to your keys.

When a 3rd party has access to your keys, their responsibilities to you are spelled out in your contract with them. That's true for CDNs as well as hosting companies.

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

#197

Post by axaxs »

psim1 wrote: post #108
sujinge9 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would firing someone make you feel like reparative measures have been taken?

Reparations would show an actual sense of responsibility. Firing someone would be appropriate if they were negligent. Other measures might be more appropriate. Is it enough that any time there's a Cloudflare incident, all we get are lengthy blog posts and sorries from Cloudflare?

Firing people for making mistakes is a great way to watch productivity dive. The easiest way to prevent mistakes is to do nothing at all.

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

#198

Post by contingencies »

abtinf wrote: post #194
contingencies wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> Until relatively recently absolutely none, and now almost none of the tooling allows effective multi-cloud or hybrid cloud/private. Until relatively recently, the cloud didn't exist.

EC2 was launched in 2006. The notes I linked to date from 2014.

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

#199

Post by stevenicr »

nemothekid wrote: post #149
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.

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.

I must disagree, and wish I had more data on how many sites host with cloudflare because it's free. I just checked, fastly is $50 per month, and Akamai doesn't list pricing so let's assume it's more.

Cloudflare has had network affects from integration with wordpress and cpanel too I believe for some time now.

without cloudflare your site can be taken offline by any random person willing to spend $20 for ddos sellers.

The free plan is a pretty big moat imho, especially if 'half the internet can fail..' - I doubt 10% of those sites would be using cloudflare if there was a monthly fee pushed on them.

Admittedly, my cloudflare usage is only about 30 sites, so my data point is small. The few hosting and design clients I have and their budget constraints are not indicative of 'half the internet' - but I don't believe fortune 500 and SV sites are either.

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

#200

Post by Nasrudith »

david-cako wrote: post #164
twblalock wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

I thought that was something trivially obvious stated about fully leveraging the benefits - that they don't control other's clouds and thus they can't use all of the same sorts of performance or efficency boosting tricks. (People would be way more mad if they did as it would require hacking into say Azure to gain root access.) Not a domain expert but it is my interpretation.

If you make the engineering decision to go multicloud for whatever reason those are inherent trade offs you need to be aware of. They have their own agenda of course in addition to any actual fundamental "real" in bulk efficiencies that price reflects.

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