Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 209 posts

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#161

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

Every HN comment seems to say the same thing: downtime is inexcusable and the centralization of these services is ruining the internet.

I still don't see the big deal. 12 hours of downtime once every couple years isn't the end of the world. So people can't log into their bank website for a few hours -- banks used to only be open for like 4 hours a day and somehow we all survived. Twitter is down? Oh what a tragedy. Customers get some refunds, Cloudflare fixes the issue, and people move on with life.

Cars still break down occasionally after 100+ years of engineering for reliability and safety. The power still goes out every now and then. Cook on the stove. The cost of making everything perfect all the time just isn't worth it.

I run my own servers on my own network and do not use Cloudflare. My stuff goes down too. And it's "decentralized" in the way you think the internet "should" be, which entails its own risks. So what do you all want, exactly? A public lashing of every developer at Cloudflare who pushes a bug to prod? A congressional investigation? I just don't understand the outrage here.

Stuff breaks occasionally. Get used to it, and design accordingly.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#162

Post by joshuamcginnis »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #161

Every HN comment seems to say the same thing: downtime is inexcusable and the centralization of these services is ruining the internet. I still don't see the big deal. 12 hours of downtime once every couple years isn't the end of the world. So people can't log into their bank website for a few hours -- banks used to only be open for like 4 hours a day and somehow we all survived. Twitter is down? Oh what a tragedy. C…

From a consumers perspective, that makes sense. From a business's perspective, downtime can mean significant loss of revenue or new business opportunity.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#163

Post by YmiYugy »

It's worth considering the counter factual. Let's say there would be a few dozen semi popular DDoS services. Would that be better? Some assumptions: The services would be slightly less effective and also have worse downtimes. You could argue that Cloudflare is coasting on a monopoly and that competition would drive them to improve, but I'm pretty confident that DDoS protection it one of those things were having a large network to absorb attacks and a large team to monitor them if very valuable. I submit as evidence that Cloudflare has been doing well despite the 3 big cloud providers offering DDoS protection.

So what would be the result of a highly decentralized but slightly worse and less reliable DDoS protection? I'd argue that for a lot of things this wouldn't be an improvement. Cloudflare being so dominant means lot's of things go down simultaneously. But that only matters for fungible services, e.g. if a schools education portal goes down, it doesn't matter if all the other education portals are also down. There are cases where it matters like the tyre pumps. I'd argue that these devices have no reason to be reliant on an online connection to begin with. I think cloud services as a whole have massively improved the reliability of internet services. In almost all cases reducing the overall amount of outages is a higher priority than preventing outage correlations.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#164

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #162
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #161

Every HN comment seems to say the same thing: downtime is inexcusable and the centralization of these services is ruining the internet. I still don't see the big deal. 12 hours of downtime once every couple years isn't the end of the world. So people can't log into their bank website for a few hours -- banks used to only be open for like 4 hours a day and somehow we all survived. Twitter is down? Oh what a tragedy. C…

From a consumers perspective, that makes sense. From a business's perspective, downtime can mean significant loss of revenue or new business opportunity.

The costs of perfection are much, much greater. Are you willing to pay 2-3x the cost of everything to go from 99.999% to 100.0000000% uptime?

Probably the only thing in existence with 100.00% uptime are our nuclear missile command and control systems. Like, even my pen runs out of ink sometimes. It's just crazy how hard it is to have stuff work all the time.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#165

Post by ahepp »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #162
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #161

Every HN comment seems to say the same thing: downtime is inexcusable and the centralization of these services is ruining the internet. I still don't see the big deal. 12 hours of downtime once every couple years isn't the end of the world. So people can't log into their bank website for a few hours -- banks used to only be open for like 4 hours a day and somehow we all survived. Twitter is down? Oh what a tragedy. C…

From a consumers perspective, that makes sense. From a business's perspective, downtime can mean significant loss of revenue or new business opportunity.

I wonder if consolidation actually makes this less of an issue for businesses?

If my website is down, but my competitors' isn't, I might lose business to them. If my competitor's website is also down, where are the customers gonna go?

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#166

Post by rigrassm »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #161

Every HN comment seems to say the same thing: downtime is inexcusable and the centralization of these services is ruining the internet. I still don't see the big deal. 12 hours of downtime once every couple years isn't the end of the world. So people can't log into their bank website for a few hours -- banks used to only be open for like 4 hours a day and somehow we all survived. Twitter is down? Oh what a tragedy. C…

> So people can't log into their bank website for a few hours, banks used to only be open for like 4 hours a day and somehow we all survived.

1. I believe it's payment processing systems not functioning properly that causes real problems for people and not simply bank websites being down. Especially given...

2. Banks being closed so much back when cash/checks were actually widely used wasn't an issue because you could just pop over to an ATM or whip out a checkbook. In today's system, every single purchase you make requires communication between the merchant, your bank, and any number of middlemen via the internet.

Yeah, cash is still used today but I've been noticing even things like school sports events have stopped taking cash all together and simply post a QR code to buy from your phone.

That is unless the school has crap cell reception (with no public Wi-Fi either!), Cloudflare shits the bed, Visa thinks you're buying porn, you locked your debit card and now can't unlock it cuz the website is down, or any one of the million things that break all the time. Replace school sports event with literally every single things that requires a financial transaction and it's easy to see how even a short outage can lead to actual harm being realized.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#167

Post by freeplay »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #155
freeplay wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is creating a single point of failure. There's no doubt a VM in AWS is exponentially more redundant than my VM running on a couple of Intel NUCs in my closet. The difference is, when I have a major outage, my blog goes down. When EC2 has a major outage, all of the blogs go down. Along with Wikipedia, Starbucks, and half the internet. That single point of failure is the issue.

Single point of failure means exactly opposite of what you think it means. If my work depends on 5 services to be up, each service would be a single point of failure, and correlation of failure is good for probability that I can do my work.

I see what you're saying but I have to push back.

"If one thing I need is going to be down, everything might as well be down."

If I have a product with 5 dependencies and one of them is down, there's things I can do to partially mitigate. A circuit breaker would allow my thing to at least stay up and responsive. Maybe I could get a status message up and turn off a feature flag to disable what calls that dependency.

On the other hand, if all my dependencies are down AND the management layer is down AND the AWS portal is not functioning correctly, I'm pretty much SOL.

Massive centralization is never, ever a good thing for anyone other than the ones who are doing the centralizing.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#168

Post by rainonmoon »

1718627440 wrote: post #129
rainonmoon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but with an asterisk. I don't care if my DO droplet gets popped with an RCE. I do care if someone establishes persistence in my home.

You can have different networks in your physical home.

And?

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#170

Post by immibis »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #147
immibis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Pretty much exactly like it does now but with less captchas. This just isn't true. e.g. I saw a 30x increase in traffic on my forum due to AI bots that I had to use CF to block. CF is mainly empowered by the naive ideals of the internet's design that never built-in countermeasures against bad actors. You're expected to just deal with it yourself somehow. And that means outsourcing it, especially as residential IP a…

You didn't have to use CF to block them. You chose to use CF to block them. How was your experience with Anubis or https://git.gammaspectra.live/git/go-away?

Or you could simply... serve the requests. If your normal traffic is only, like, 1 request per minute, then 30x that is still pretty low and there's no actual reason to worry about it.

Web hosting providers don't offer bot blockers because first, they have no reason to care, and second, they can serve the requests, and third, some of them want to upsell you on bandwidth (you should prefer the ones with unmetered bandwidth).

BTW AFAIK there's still zero evidence that the massive DDoS wave has anything at all to do with AI. It could be, say, one of Russia's many small avenues of trying to break the West, or Cloudflare trying to get more business, or the NSA trying to make Cloudflare get more business because it's tapped into Cloudflare.

Post reply on HN