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Cloudflare API, dashboard, tunnels down

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Re: Cloudflare API, dashboard, tunnels down

#41

Post by djbusby »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #30
dijit wrote: post #14

If you’re waiting for the inevitable “this is why we shouldn't centralize everything”; this is that comment. As much as I like cloudflare and easy to use stuff, lets be a little bit mindful of the blast radius of highly centralized services which are even more complex to operate due to the scale of the deployment and problem scope. luckily this time its just administrative interfaces and supplemental services that as…

Most people blame Cloudflare and Amazon for centralizing everything. I actually disagree; the centralization is a symptom of severe, systemic, unfixable flaws in the design of the internet itself. At least we didn't let AOL define internet.

Such as?

Re: Cloudflare API, dashboard, tunnels down

#42

Post by solardev »

dijit wrote: post #14

If you’re waiting for the inevitable “this is why we shouldn't centralize everything”; this is that comment. As much as I like cloudflare and easy to use stuff, lets be a little bit mindful of the blast radius of highly centralized services which are even more complex to operate due to the scale of the deployment and problem scope. luckily this time its just administrative interfaces and supplemental services that as…

Is it really that bad? Services go down for a few minutes, maybe a few hours? A thousand other companies are down at the same time.

Grab lunch, come back, and it'll have fixed itself. Nobody blames you because it's just another provider outage -- whether it's Cloudflare or AWS or Microsoft or Gmail doesn't really matter, it's a convenient outsourcing of not just network admin but also blame.

The alternative is, what, doing it all in-house with a bunch of people on pager duty? Few companies can afford that. Diversifying across multiple cloud providers? Sure, if multi-nines uptime is really critical for your business.

For most small-med businesses, it's more valuable to be able to rapidly build on top of existing, professionally-maintained infrastructure in order to deliver some unique business value on top of it, than to recreate that basic network infra themselves. If you're not a FAANG, going down for a few hours a year isn't really a big deal. Especially when you can just blame it on an overall "internet outage at some big provider" rather than some internal fuck-up.

Re: Cloudflare API, dashboard, tunnels down

#44

Post by AtNightWeCode »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #22
AtNightWeCode wrote: post #7

[flagged]

If you want to find out who uses Cloudflare, can I interest you in what's known as the domain name service?

You and all the others did not get it did you. The size of the outcry corresponds to the user base. If you fked something up that was really used at scale this thread would have exploded.

Re: Cloudflare API, dashboard, tunnels down

#45

Post by solardev »

ta1243 wrote: post #31
baq wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, cloudflare or AWS down means half the internet doesn't work at all. The half that works - routing around problematic networks - isn't very helpful when the problematic networks are the useful ones.

Depends what you want to get to. HN doesn't use any centralised services. If someone chooses to host their service relying on a single unreliable point of failure that's on them. Plenty more hosts on the web.

> Depends what you want to get to. HN doesn't use any centralised services.

It's also one of the least reliable and performant public forums I've ever used. It goes down or slows down several times a week for me. Wish they'd just move it to the cloud instead of occasionally upgrading the bare metal...

Re: Cloudflare API, dashboard, tunnels down

#46

Post by gjsman-1000 »

djbusby wrote: post #41
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people blame Cloudflare and Amazon for centralizing everything. I actually disagree; the centralization is a symptom of severe, systemic, unfixable flaws in the design of the internet itself. At least we didn't let AOL define internet.

Such as?

1. DDoS Attacks

2. Port scanning attacks

3. Geolocation attacks (you shouldn't run a server from your home, when your IP Address could be used to find you; be it from a hack or an abuse of the legal process)

4. The US internet relying on a backbone mostly operated by 4 companies (meaning a direct connection is a massive perk)

For as much as we moan about Amazon and Cloudflare centralizing things; believe me, just taking out Level 3 / Lumen would be almost an act of war and would affect every ISP and cloud provider.

If you took out Lumen, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, and AT&T, just those 3 companies; that's 2.35 million kilometers of fiber going dark. For reference, Comcast has "only" 150,000 km.

Re: Cloudflare API, dashboard, tunnels down

#47

Post by bern4444 »

Downtime happens - no one is happy about it but it comes with the job and downtime will happen whether you use cloud or run on prem.

Cloudflare at least accurately reflects the incident on their status page.

Often dashboards will show everything green despite the service being down.

In these moments communication is critical and Cloudflare does it well especially as we all know when it comes to the post mortem. They are very transparent about these issues and incidents.

Re: Cloudflare API, dashboard, tunnels down

#49

Post by justin_oaks »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #30
dijit wrote: post #14

If you’re waiting for the inevitable “this is why we shouldn't centralize everything”; this is that comment. As much as I like cloudflare and easy to use stuff, lets be a little bit mindful of the blast radius of highly centralized services which are even more complex to operate due to the scale of the deployment and problem scope. luckily this time its just administrative interfaces and supplemental services that as…

Most people blame Cloudflare and Amazon for centralizing everything. I actually disagree; the centralization is a symptom of severe, systemic, unfixable flaws in the design of the internet itself. At least we didn't let AOL define internet.

I'd appreciate if you'd elaborate on that. (Edit: I see you elaborated somewhat in another comment posted before I finished this comment)

I tend to think centralization is more about people's tendencies than it is internet design. As I see it, centralization on the internet happens as the emergent behavior of all of the elements in the system and the forces that exist. In other words, it's the natural result of incentives.

People use centralized services because

- prices (economies of scale)

- network effects ("I can't certain people without WhatsApp")

- social pressures ("People look at me weird when I say I don't have an Instagram")

- visibility ("There are other CRMs than SalesForce?")

- making choices easy ("I don't want to choose between all these options. I'll pick the most familiar")

- safety ("Nobody got fired for choosing IBM")

- convenience ("It's a pain to self-host")

- security ("Google probably protects data better than I can")

- etc

Re: Cloudflare API, dashboard, tunnels down

#50

Post by cj »

dijit wrote: post #14

If you’re waiting for the inevitable “this is why we shouldn't centralize everything”; this is that comment. As much as I like cloudflare and easy to use stuff, lets be a little bit mindful of the blast radius of highly centralized services which are even more complex to operate due to the scale of the deployment and problem scope. luckily this time its just administrative interfaces and supplemental services that as…

I think the solution here isn’t “don’t use Cloudflare” … IMO if you need high availability and can’t tolerate downtime, then deploy and split load between 2 or more providers (e.g. Cloudflare, Fastly) and 2 or more clouds.

The centralization around AWS and GCP and Azure is more concerning to me than the centralization around Cloudflare. It’s not obvious to me why lots of people using Cloudflare is any worse than lots of people using AWS.

If we go even deeper, the entire internet runs on a limited number of undersea cables connecting continents. That in particular has always seemed like the most vulnerable aspect of the internet, considering a targeted attack on < 100 locations could meaningfully cut off internet access for millions (billions?) of people for an extended period of time.

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