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Cloudflare had a partial outage

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Re: Cloudflare had a partial outage

#371

Post by nabla9 »

danachow wrote: post #369
nabla9 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mid 2000s one computer science professor said that internet capacity is not going to match the amount of traffic. Everybody laughed. The wold was full of dark fiber after dot-com-bust. But if you look at his math, it was correct. The era of client-server connected heterogeneous distributed Internet is just a side show today. The solution has been centralization (clarification: big companies run their own caches and n…

> The solution has been centralization and growth of caches. Centralization and growth of caches are on their face contradictory. Perhaps you mean organizational centralization but that really has nothing to do with internet capacity demands. Your hot take isn’t so brilliant. What’s fundamentally wrong with edge distribution?

> Perhaps you mean organizational centralization

Yes. This is exactly what I mean. Big companies run their own caches and networks near users. Cloudflare takes care of the rest.

>What’s fundamentally wrong with edge distribution?

You incorrectly assume judgement from my part. My point is that things have changed. New problems arise in solution to old problems. Fragility from small number of organizations running their caches to solve bandwidth problem.

Re: Cloudflare had a partial outage

#372

Post by jimmydorry »

chippiewill wrote: post #360
jimmydorry wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, the cloudflare.com site is a more reliable indicator. If it doesn't load, then cloudflare is down. Their status page is a joke, likely crippled to reduce legal liability, but at this point it's just an outright misrepresentation.

> Their status page is a joke, likely crippled to reduce legal liability, but at this point it's just an outright misrepresentation. It's fairly standard practice these days for status pages to be manually updated. The difficulty with having them be automatically updated is that for it to be useful that system needs to have a greater reliability than the thing it's monitoring. The signal to noise ratio is otherwise a…

Reddit Status [1] isn't perfect, but it's miles better than a static page saying everything is operational while everything is in-fact inaccessible. That it took 30 minutes for the page saying everything is fine to be updated with a warning that there is an issue (while almost all of the services and regions remained marked as operational) only makes the ineffectiveness of that page more blatant.

It goes without saying that the monitoring system must be separate from what it's monitoring and must be more reliable. Compared to running a CDN for half of the internet, automated monitoring is table-stakes.

[1] https://www.redditstatus.com/

Re: Cloudflare had a partial outage

#373

Post by notwedtm »

numpad0 wrote: post #230
prawn wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're talking about getting accurate information from an employee posting on HN rather than on the status page, rather than the outage itself.

Because of state and federal regulations, the path through back doors, fire exits and water coolers are always shorter from engineer's desks to the planetary atmosphere than it is through the front door and reception areas.

What?

Re: Cloudflare had a partial outage

#374

Post by jgrahamc »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #367
jimmygrapes wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"do no evil" springs to mind -- once burned, etc.

Yeah, What's up with the competition to Cloudflare? What's the real barrier for entry? It's not infrastructure anymore, As there is a new PaaS startup every week offering distributed hosting and So why bundling in DNS, DDOS detection+mitigation, cloud workers... with it is so hard?

It's hard at scale.

Re: Cloudflare had a partial outage

#375

Post by capableweb »

woojoo666 wrote: post #105

Wow lots of websites are affected, including Medium. The perils of centralization strike again. Though ironically, I noticed that the IPFS website uses cloudflare as well. The actual IPFS network is working just fine though, and I'm not aware of IPFS ever having any global outages. Though then again, I'm not aware of any on bittorrent either

The concept of "being down" doesn't really apply to protocols. IPFS/BitTorrent never being down is a bit like saying that TCP/HTTP has never been down. Individual servers/client can have connection issues, but obviously won't affect clients not connected to those, and is not because of the protocols themselves.

Re: Cloudflare had a partial outage

#376

Post by jgrahamc »

hobofan wrote: post #326
jgrahamc wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry about that.

Would it be possible to adjust that 500 page to include an indication that it originates from Cloudflare, for the case that an outage like this happens again in the future?

I was surprised by that also. Will ask.

Re: Cloudflare had a partial outage

#377

Post by ilaksh »

joebob42 wrote: post #136

Kind of ironic, there was a big "cloudflare is bad and a central point of failure" article on the front page just a couple days ago. Found it, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31801947 edit: Not that I necessarily agree with the article even in light of there being an outage, cloudflare has been pretty good for us. Just thought it was interesting.

Cloudflare usually works great. That doesn't mean they aren't a central point of failure.

Re: Cloudflare had a partial outage

#378

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

jgrahamc wrote: post #374
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, What's up with the competition to Cloudflare? What's the real barrier for entry? It's not infrastructure anymore, As there is a new PaaS startup every week offering distributed hosting and So why bundling in DNS, DDOS detection+mitigation, cloud workers... with it is so hard?

It's hard at scale.

Isn't everything harder at scale? That's not a barrier for entry though.

Re: Cloudflare had a partial outage

#379

Post by easytiger »

eins1234 wrote: post #361
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine having to pay for a service

Imagine already paying for a service and then having someone snark at you for wanting things for free. I tried to exercise some restraint this time, but screw it. Here's another rant: Beware of Cloudflare's tactic of luring people in to their CDN product with "free" bandwidth, and then locking useful features arbitrarily behind what I can only imagine is a thousands of dollars per month enterprise plan. Just look at…

Can I ask out of interest (most of my projects are high perf/low traffic) what kind of traffic you are dealing with at the point you decide you need a CDN?

Re: Cloudflare had a partial outage

#380

Post by tinco »

garyclarke27 wrote: post #368
adwww wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare's pricing has issues. My company was paying $20 a month. We were heavily depended on CF, we'd have been happy to pay more. But... the one feature we wanted was for our accounts team to have their own login so the ops team didn't have to download invoices every month. Nope, that one feature required an enterprise plan which they quoted $4,000 a month for.

Oh dear your poor Ops team, they had to download a few invoices to save $4k and every month! My heart bleeds for them.

Companies where you have to log in and download invoices are the worst. If there's a viable alternative to their products I switch immediately. You make it seem like it's not a big deal, but a reasonably sized startup has dozens of service providers. Should we pay every little service $4k/mo just to save the communications and context switching overhead?
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