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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”

#131

Post by eganist »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #90
jgrahamc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read our S-1, it's all in there. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...

Hey John, thanks for taking the time to reply. Respectfully, the info in the S1 (flywheels, etc.) seem to be what sustains you _now_. Maybe a better question is "how did you identify and kick off that flywheel?"

Don't take this as being glib, but isn't this the entire point of funding rounds? Demonstrate growth and talk about a few approaches to creating a business model that you're investigating, which then brings investors on as they're betting you'll find one that'll succeed?

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

#132

Post by DoctorOW »

icedchai wrote: post #117
mfkp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many DNS providers have the ability to do AXFR "zone transfers", so you can sync your records to a secondary provider and you would add a secondary set of nameservers for redundancy. Unfortunately Cloudflare doesn't offer this unless you pay for their Enterprise plan (they started offering it earlier this year). I do love using CloudFlare for DNS, lots of great features and generally works well, but I wish they would…

Amazing that this isn't "free" and folks have to resort to syncing records across DNS providers with proprietary, vendor-specific APIs. AXFR is standard. It's not just Cloudflare... AWS and Azure don't support it either.

With Cloudflare's popularity, I'll bet if they started supporting it, others would too.

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

#133

Post by gizmo385 »

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 just going to foster a culture of secrecy and shame. Being so quick to fire is not how you retain talent and it isn't how you foster a healthy, blameless development culture in your workplace.

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

#134

Post by WayToDoor »

mfkp wrote: post #55
saagarjha wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of these companies should have had fail-over to competitors at least for reliability. How would you even set such a thing up? I fear that you might get a couple of collusionary companies that bail each other out and smaller providers might just be left out to dry…

Many DNS providers have the ability to do AXFR "zone transfers", so you can sync your records to a secondary provider and you would add a secondary set of nameservers for redundancy. Unfortunately Cloudflare doesn't offer this unless you pay for their Enterprise plan (they started offering it earlier this year). I do love using CloudFlare for DNS, lots of great features and generally works well, but I wish they would…

Fwiw, you could use stack overflow DNS Control to manage your DNS records and upload them to many providers. Then the only thing you'd have to do is flip a line of code to fallback to the other DNS provider.

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

#135

Post by sschueller »

nonbirithm wrote: post #102

Question: is it even possible to have DDoS protection without using a provider of it which becomes a single point of failure? Or is it maybe possible to decouple this single feature from everything else that Cloudflare provides that could take out all the sites in the future from an unrelated misconfiguration? I don't see the centralization as a positive, but I'm wondering what percentage of the websites that were ta…

Sure, Arbour and others sell devices to deal with ddos and many isps have clusters of these which you can use. Of course this is a service that costs money.

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

#136

Post by mfkp »

WayToDoor wrote: post #134
mfkp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many DNS providers have the ability to do AXFR "zone transfers", so you can sync your records to a secondary provider and you would add a secondary set of nameservers for redundancy. Unfortunately Cloudflare doesn't offer this unless you pay for their Enterprise plan (they started offering it earlier this year). I do love using CloudFlare for DNS, lots of great features and generally works well, but I wish they would…

Fwiw, you could use stack overflow DNS Control to manage your DNS records and upload them to many providers. Then the only thing you'd have to do is flip a line of code to fallback to the other DNS provider.

Nice, didn't know about that tool. Checking it out now: https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol

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

#137

Post by benmanns »

morrbo wrote: post #78
jgrahamc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read our S-1, it's all in there. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...

II love cloudflare. It has really helped out with several sites/projects that I have worked on and the service is top notch. I am also an investor. I tend to invest in stuff which I use a lot or trust/respect the employees. Weirdly what made me really invest is the level of geekiness on the company. I remember seeing you guys using a lava lamp wall to generate entropy and just thought "that's awesome". I just wanted…

If you use Cloudflare workers, you could put together a maintenance page with a simple script + Cloudflare Workers KV as a toggle switch. It would cost $5/mo if you're not already using workers.

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

#138

Post by debacle »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #105
potency wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince spoke to CNBC upon banning Daily Stormer: “We were worried that people would say, ‘We won’t work with you anymore,’” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told CNBC. “We had to have the conversation now because at some point we’ll be a public company. We had to prompt that discussion,” said Prince, who added “we want to be ready internally by July 2018,” for a possible stock offering. CNBC Link:…

Yes, and then they banned 8Chan just the same (I think? One of those sites where a shooter talked to his friends) as soon as they were under pressure.

Likely the reddit model. Don't ban anything until it hits you in the pocket book.

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

#139

Post by mercer »

Sephiroth87 wrote: post #64
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your app will go down when half the Internet goes down" is not that big of a deal to most software companies, because: 1. no one's going to blame me if my app goes down when half the Internet is also down but they are going to blame me if my custom solution to the same thing causes an outage, 2. there's no way my custom solution is going to achieve the same uptime. AWS/Cloudflare/Azure are not perfect, but whatever…

They do blame you though, most people won't be aware of the real issue, when cloudflare went down, the trending things on twitter were #spotifydown and #applemusic

I suspect customers complaining on Twitter are not the ones cared about to whoever decides to use Cloudflare.

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

#140

Post by AlexandrB »

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…

> My reservation with Cloudflare is the concept of letting a third party MitM my SSL traffic.

I wonder what the Venn diagram of people who insist every website must use HTTPS for privacy reasons and Cloudflare users looks like.

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