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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

#191

Post by bobbob27 »

tracker1 wrote: post #178
ectospheno wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty cloudflare centric. I didn’t start that way. I had services spread out for redundancy. It was a huge pain. Then bots got even more aggressive than usual. I asked why I kept doing this to myself and finally decided my time was worth recapturing. Did everything become inaccessible the last outage? Yep. Weighed against the time it saves me throughout the year I call it a wash. No plans to move.

I'm of a similar mindset... yeah, it's inconvenient when "everything" goes down... but realistically so many things go down now and then, it just happens. Could just as easily be my home's internet connection, or a service I need from/at work, etc. It's always going to be something, it's just more noticeable when it affects so many other things.

To be honest, it's MUCH easier to have one source to blame when things go down. If a small-medium vendor's website goes down on a normal day, so poor IT guy is going to be fielding calls all day.

If that same vendor goes down because Cloudflare went down, oh well. Most already know and won't bother to ask when your site will be back up

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#192

Post by kordlessagain »

philipallstar wrote: post #189
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…

> As if anybody could viably stop using them. It is as easy to not use them as it ever was. There has been no actual centralisation. Everything is done using open protocols. I don't know what more you could want. Compare it to Windows where there is deep volume discounting and salespeople shmoozing CTOs and getting in with schools, healthcare providers etc etc. That's actual lock-in.

When the tubes go down the tubes it will be the fault of those who are complacent.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#194

Post by inemesitaffia »

zamadatix wrote: post #133
immibis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They provide free services to DDoS-for-hire services and do not terminate the services when reported.

Not that I doubt examples exist (I've yet to be at a large place with 0 failures on responding to such issues over the years), but it'd be nice if you'd share the specific examples you have in mind if you're going to bother commenting about it. It helps people understand how much is a systemic problem to be interested in vs having a comment which more easily falls into many other buckets instead. I'd try to build tru…

Search for any booster service, or hacking forum period and check who's hosting it.

Same thing with any service that hijacks and redirects your session.

Almost always CloudFlare.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#195

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

chii wrote: post #182
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the root cause is customers refusing to punish these downtime. ok how do I punish cloudflare -- build my own globally-distributed content-delivery network just for myself so that I can be "decentralized"? Or should I go to one of their even-larger competitors like AWS or GCP? What exactly do you propose?

you are not a customer of cloudflare. You need to be punishing the services you "paid" to use, but had downtime. So did you terminate any of those services for downtime, or had any sort of punishment done to them as a result?

Ok but the price I am paying includes some % of downtime in the SLA, and I am ok with that.

If I wanted 100.00000% uptime, I would have to pay much more, but I don't want to

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#196

Post by blamestross »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #164
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel obligated to point out that basically no commercial service that relies on a big tech company has better than 99.99% uptime anymore. Your example isn't just hyperbolic, it avoid the actual problem. It isn't that "a bit more reliable" is "nontrivial less reliable than 5 years ago."

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#197

Post by immibis »

MikeNotThePope wrote: post #119
dewey wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. These days it seems like everything is a micro-optimization to squeeze out a little extra revenue. Eventually most companies lose sight of the need to offer a compelling product that people would be willing to wait for.

Why can't we just take pride in doing a good job?

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#198

Post by YetAnotherNick »

freeplay wrote: post #167
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. O…

So if you can just run without one service, what's stopping you to remove the dependency altogether. Why would you only want to remove the dependency when service is down.

So e.g. to get real my application depends on AWS's EC2, RDS, EKS, S3 Cloudflare's DNS, and Redis' instance. If any of those stop working it will go down. If everyone is within SLA, they might as well go down together than separately.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#199

Post by tete »

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…

> As if anybody could viably stop using them.

To be fair AWS (and GCP and Azure) at least is easy to replace with something else. And pretty much all alternatives are cheaper, less messy, etc. There are very few situations where you cannot viably do so.

We live in a world where you can get things like dedicated servers, etc. within similar time spans as creating a "compute engine" node on a big cloud provider.

The fact that cloud services added serious limitations to what applications were able to do (things like state management, passing configuration in more unified ways, etc.) means that running your own infrastructure is easier than ever, since your devs won't end up whining at you until you do something super custom just for some project to be a bit easier. But if you really want to you can.

GitHub also has become easy to get away from and indeed many individuals and companies did so.

CDNs are the bigger thing but A) there are a lot of other CDNs and B) having an image, or lets say an ansible config allows you to quickly deploy something that might be close enough for your use case. Just take any hosting company or even a dozen around the world.

Of course if you allowed yourself to end up in a complete vendor lock in things might be different, but if you think that it's a good idea to be completely dependent on the whims of some other company maybe you deserve that state. As in don't run a business without having any kind of fallback for decisions you make. Yes, profit from that big benefit something might give you, but don't lock the door behind you.

Sure you might be lucky and sure maybe you are fine going for luck while it lasts. Just don't be surprised when it all shatters.

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