Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like the other poster said, roll back should be the right answer the vast majority of the time. But it's also important to recognize that roll forward should be a replacement for the deployment you decided not to roll back, not a parallel deployment through another system. I won't say never, but a situation where the right answer to avoid a rollback (that it sounds like was technically fine to do, just undesirable fr…
Is a roll back even possible at Cloudflare's size? With small deployments it usually isn't too difficult to re-deploy a previous commit. But once you get big enough you've got enough developers that half a dozen PRs will have been merged since the start of the incident and now. How viable is it to stop the world, undo everything, and start from scratch any time a deployment causes the tiniest issues? Realistically th…
Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
251–260 of 601 posts
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
... until the extended-range version is ordered and no one remembers to fix the leak. :]
They will remember, because it'll have been measured and documented, rigorously.
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#253What I'm missing here is a test environment. Gradual or not; why are they deploying straight to prod? At Cloudflare's scale, there should be a dedicated room in Cloudflare HQ with a full isolated model-scale deployment of their entire system. All changes should go there first, with tests run for every possible scenario. Only after that do you use gradual deployment, with a big red oopsie button which immediately roll…
Neither will seatbelts if you drive into the ocean, or helmets if you drink poison. I'm not sure what your point is.
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#254Cloudflare is now below 99.9% uptime, for anyone keeping track. I reckon my home PC is at least 99.9%.
Indeed. AWS too. I feel like the cloud hosting companies have lost the plot. "They can provide better uptime than us" is the entire rationale that a lot of small companies have when choosing to run everything in the cloud. If they cost more AND they're less reliable, what exactly is the reason to not self host?
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Kudos"? This is like the South Park episode in which the oil company guy just excuses himself while the company just continues to fuck up over and over again. There's nothing to praise, this shouldn't happen twice in a month. Its inexcusable.
twice in a month _so far_
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#256Whats going on with cloudflare's software team? I have seen similar bugs in cloudflare API recently as well. There is an endpoint for a feature that is available only to enterprise users, but the check for whether the user is on an enterprise plan is done at the last step.
My guess? Code written by AI
https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/jobs/?department=Engineer...
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like the other poster said, roll back should be the right answer the vast majority of the time. But it's also important to recognize that roll forward should be a replacement for the deployment you decided not to roll back, not a parallel deployment through another system. I won't say never, but a situation where the right answer to avoid a rollback (that it sounds like was technically fine to do, just undesirable fr…
Is a roll back even possible at Cloudflare's size? With small deployments it usually isn't too difficult to re-deploy a previous commit. But once you get big enough you've got enough developers that half a dozen PRs will have been merged since the start of the incident and now. How viable is it to stop the world, undo everything, and start from scratch any time a deployment causes the tiniest issues? Realistically th…
The short answer is "yes" due to the way the configuration management works. Other infrastructure changes or service upgrades might get undone, but it's possible. Or otherwise revert the commit that introduced the package bump with the new code and force that to rollout everywhere rather than waiting for progressive rollout.
There shouldn't be much chance of bringing the system to a novel state because configuration management will largely put things into the correct state. (Where that doesn't work is if CM previously created files, it won't delete them unless explicitly told to do so.)
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#258Cloudflare is now below 99.9% uptime, for anyone keeping track. I reckon my home PC is at least 99.9%.
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#259Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
They will remember, because it'll have been measured and documented, rigorously.
I've found that the real trick with documentation isn't creation, it's discovery. I wonder how that information is easily found afterwards.
I realise this may probably boggle the mind of the modern software developer.