Live data from Hacker News

Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

cloudflarestatus.com

761–770 of 1001 posts

Re: Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

#762
post #744

Hey, this is fun, all my websites are still up! I wonder how that happened? I don't even have to worry about my docker registry being down because I set up my own after the last global outage.

I had a lot of fun like you as well, until I got my first DDoS and bot attacks. There's a reason Cloudflare has 20% of internet traffic.

Re: Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

#765

How did we get to a place where either Cloudflare or AWS having an outage means a large part of the web going down? This centralization is very worrying.

Many reasons but DDoS protection has massive network effects. The more customers you have (and therefore bandwidth provision) the easier it is to hold up against a DDoS, as DDoS are targeting just one (usually) customer.

So there are massive economies of scale. Small CDN with (say) 10,000 customers and 10mbit/sec per customer can handle 100gbit/s DDoS (way too simplistic, but hopefully you get the idea) - way too small.

If you have the same traffic provisioned on average per customer and have 1 million customers, you can handle a DDoS 100x the size.

Only way to compete with this is to massively overprovision bandwidth per customer (which is expensive, as those customers won't pay more just for you to have more redundancy because you are smaller).

In a way (like many things in infrastructure) CDNs are natural monopolies. The bigger you get -> the more bandwidth and PoP you can have -> more attractive to more customers (this repeats over and over).

It was probably very astute of Cloudflare to realise that offering such a generous free plan was a key step in this.

Re: Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

#766

A colleague of mine just came bursting through my office door in a panic, thinking he brought our site down since this happened just as he made some changes to our Cloudflare config. He was pretty relieved to see this post.

Did your colleague perhaps change the Cloudflare config again right now? Seems to be down again.

Re: Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

#768

How did we get to a place where either Cloudflare or AWS having an outage means a large part of the web going down? This centralization is very worrying.

Don't think there is anything wrong with a centralised service being down, you just make a conscious decision if you want that and can afford that?

People not being ready for cloudflare/[insert hyperscaler] to be possibly down is the only fault.

Post reply on HN