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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”

#201

Post by icedchai »

abtinf wrote: post #194
contingencies wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is customers choosing to put all their eggs in one basket. Until relatively recently absolutely none, and now almost none of the tooling allows effective multi-cloud or hybrid cloud/private. Basically the cloud providers work very hard to prevent the commodification of their services with special incompatible service offerings, lock-in, interdependency, deep and opaque APIs for integration, and networks o…

> Until relatively recently absolutely none, and now almost none of the tooling allows effective multi-cloud or hybrid cloud/private. Until relatively recently, the cloud didn't exist.

The cloud is marketing speak for what has been going on for decades. In the 70's, it was called time sharing.

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

#202

Post by Nasrudith »

Spivak wrote: post #147
modo_mario wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A natural monopoly is a good thing. How so?

If you have a "monopoly" which is this case just means you're the market leader by a wide margin, but in theory this could mean near total control of a market but the reason you have this total control is because your customers choose to buy from you over your competitors simply because you're better and or cheaper then this is a good thing. Customers are getting what they want. And the market leader in this situatio…

I would personally phrase it pedantically as not that the natural monopoly is good but that it exists because they are good. A fine distinction and a baked in assumption admittedly that if they were to no longer be good they would no longer dominate. Technically there are some other variables like if an extended stay on top would atrophy any competitors or not and the time scale operated upon.

On a century scale individual murderers aren't a huge concern to society because they are either dead or infirm by then.

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

#203

Post by dang »

otherprob wrote: post #42
drawkbox wrote: post #13

That is the problem with massive centralization even if it is market level and internally Cloudflare (or any other big fish) does decentralization/fail-over of their own. Many of these companies should have had fail-over to competitors at least for reliability. The problem with near market monopolization, oligopoly, even the singularity, the fail-case is catastrophic and may even wipe out decentralized, diffused, dis…

The bigger problem is that technology advancements gravitate at the demands of the noisiest, with the most social gravity. Yes there are a lot of smart people at FAANG and Cloudflare corp. There are a lot of just as capable folks not driven by job addicted meme. Technically there’s no reason the web couldn’t be replaced with 1:many via Wireshark key sharing based access control to local content. But via Wall Street,…

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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

#204

Post by Nasrudith »

louwrentius wrote: post #127

Who at a C-level position is going to tell anybody that the potential risk of Cloudflare (or Amazon/Azure/GCP) going down should be protected against? I would applaud them, but I wonder.

My guess is Wall Street HFT or other financial areas with very strict unscheduled downtime penalties where they are effectively incentivised to be batshit paranoid as it would take decades for any penny pinching to remotely pay off. I don't know if many of them use Cloudflare for their domains though.

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

#205

Post by [deleted] »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #182
jonny_eh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always a line, and therefore, I'm ok with drawing the line at Nazis.

> There's always a line This is where you've gone wrong. There isn't always a line, some businesses are in the business of selling products and services and not in the business of policing content. And if some of their customers are pedophiles or the like then have the police arrest the pedophiles and leave the fry cooks and gas station attendants out of it, even if the pedophiles eat food and drive cars.

[deleted]

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

#206

Post by rhizome »

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…

> I remember seeing you guys using a lava lamp wall to generate entropy and just thought "that's awesome".

To be sure (and for the sake of internet rando completenessism), it does look like CF waited until the original SGI patent on the technique ran out. :)

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5732138

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

#207

Post by jonplackett »

jniedrauer wrote: post #189
0xEFF wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't use them for DNS, just point 60 second TTL A records at them.

Where do you put your DNS servers? On-prem is going to be less reliable than cloudflare which has a 100% uptime SLA. I doubt your local ops team can compete.

my thoughts exactly. still none the wiser what the solution is.

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

#208

Post by psim1 »

axaxs wrote: post #197
psim1 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a great way to watch productivity dive. The easiest way to prevent mistakes is to do nothing at all.

I understand the point being made here, but what are those affected supposed to take away? Cloudflare made a mistake that caused (x millions of dollars of lost online commerce revenues, y number of missed telehealth sessions, etc.) and since we do not punish mistakes, nothing was done. Sorry everyone!

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

#210

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #153
fennecfoxen wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I'm not mistaken, 8Chan also hosted a lot of illegal content in addition to that "legal speech".

And yet, it was not for anything illegal that they were taken down.
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