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The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

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Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#101

Post by torginus »

What happens if you don't use Cloudflare and just host everything on a server?

Can't you run a website like that if you don't host heavy content?

How common are DDOS attacks anyway, and aren't there local (to the server), that analyze user behavior to a decent accuracy (at least it can tell they're using a real browser and behaving more or less like a human would, making attacks expensive).

Can't you buy a list of ISP ranges from a GeoIP provider (you can), at least then you'd know which addresses belong to real humans.

I don't think botnets are that big of a problem (maybe in some obscure places of the world, but you can temp rangeban a certain IP range, if there's a lot of suspicious traffic coming from there).

If lots of legit networks (as in belonging to people who are paying an ISP for their network connections) have botnets, that's means most PCs are compromised, which is a much more severe issue.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#102

Post by DANmode »

imsurajkadam wrote: post #15
DANmode wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn how to host anything, today.

Even if you learn to Host, there are many other services that are going to get relied on those centralised platforms, so if you are thinking to Host, every single thing on your own, then it is going to be more work than you can even imagine and definitely super hard to organise as well

Anything.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#103

Post by fragmede »

rzerowan wrote: post #70

So were going backwards to a world where there are basically 5 computers running everything and everyone is basically accessing the world through a dumb terminal.Even though the digital slab in our pockets has more compute than a roomful of the early gen devices. Hopefully critical infrashifts back to managed metal or private clouds - dont see it though with the last decades of cloud evangalism to move all legacy sys…

Yeah it's crazy to realize it takes a room of electronics for me to get my (g)mail. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#104

Post by dijit »

torginus wrote: post #101

What happens if you don't use Cloudflare and just host everything on a server? Can't you run a website like that if you don't host heavy content? How common are DDOS attacks anyway, and aren't there local (to the server), that analyze user behavior to a decent accuracy (at least it can tell they're using a real browser and behaving more or less like a human would, making attacks expensive). Can't you buy a list of IS…

Yeah, you can.

Lots of people use raspberry pi’s for this, which is a smidge anaemic for some decent load (HN Hug Of Death)- even an Intel N100 is more grunt, for context.

This makes people think that their self hosting setup can never handle HN load; because when they see people talking about self hosting the site goes down.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#105

Post by immibis »

oidar wrote: post #34

I wonder what would life without cloudflare look like? What practices would fill the gaps if a company didn't - or wasn't allowed to -- satisfy the the concerns that cloudflare fills.

Pretty much exactly like it does now but with less captchas.

Fun fact: Headless browsers can easily pass cloudflare captchas automatically. They're not actually captchaing - they're just a placebo. You just need to be coming from a residential IP address and using a real browser.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#106

Post by dewey »

immibis wrote: post #99
Xelbair wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more so when most of the internet is also down. What are customers going to do? Go to competitor that's also down? It is extremely annoying, will ruin your day, but as movie quote goes - if everyone is special, no one is.

They could go to your competitor that's up. If you choose to be up, your competitor's customers could go to you.

If it’s that easy to get the exact same service / product as another vendor the maybe your competitive advantage isn’t so high. If Amazon would be down I’d just wait a few hours as I don’t want to sign up on another site.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#107

Post by fragmede »

krick wrote: post #10

It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. As if a single person reading this post wasn't aware that the Internet is centralized, and couldn't name specifically a few sources of centralization (Cloudflare, AWS, Gmail, Github). As if it's the first time this happens. As if after the last time AWS failed (or the one before that, or one before…) anybody stopped using AWS. As if a…

> It obviously won't.

Here's where we separate the men from the boys, the women from the girls, the Enbys from the enbetts, and the SREs from the DevOps. If you went down when Cloudflare went do, do you go multicloud so that can't happen again, or do you shrug your shoulders and say "well, everyone else is down"? Have some pride in your work, do better, be better, and strive for greatness. Have backup plans for your backup plans, and get out of the pit of mediocrity.

Or not, shit's expensive and kubernetes is too complicated and "no one" needs that.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#108

Post by dewey »

torginus wrote: post #101

What happens if you don't use Cloudflare and just host everything on a server? Can't you run a website like that if you don't host heavy content? How common are DDOS attacks anyway, and aren't there local (to the server), that analyze user behavior to a decent accuracy (at least it can tell they're using a real browser and behaving more or less like a human would, making attacks expensive). Can't you buy a list of IS…

Botnets use real residential connections not just data centers. So your static list of “real people” doesn’t really make a difference.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#109

Post by rkomorn »

fragmede wrote: post #107
krick wrote: post #10

It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. As if a single person reading this post wasn't aware that the Internet is centralized, and couldn't name specifically a few sources of centralization (Cloudflare, AWS, Gmail, Github). As if it's the first time this happens. As if after the last time AWS failed (or the one before that, or one before…) anybody stopped using AWS. As if a…

> It obviously won't. Here's where we separate the men from the boys, the women from the girls, the Enbys from the enbetts, and the SREs from the DevOps. If you went down when Cloudflare went do, do you go multicloud so that can't happen again, or do you shrug your shoulders and say "well, everyone else is down"? Have some pride in your work, do better, be better, and strive for greatness. Have backup plans for your…

You make the appropriate cost/benefit decision for your business and ignore apathy on one side and dogma on the other.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#110

Post by bloppe »

krige wrote: post #41
MikeNotThePope wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a little downtime such a bad thing? Trying to avoid some bumps and bruises in your business has diminishing returns.

What's "a little downtime" to you might be work ruined and day wasted for someone else.

I remember a Google cloud outage years ago that happened to coincide with one of our customers' massively expensive TV ads. All the people who normally would've gone straight to their website instead got 502. Probably a 1M+ loss for them all things considered.

We got an extremely angry email about it.

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