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Questions for Cloudflare

entropicthoughts.com

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Re: Questions for Cloudflare

#41

Post by koakuma-chan »

colesantiago wrote: post #37
koakuma-chan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't trust a provider that has "Excellent (underlined) star star star star star STAR TrustPilot 4.8 on G2" on their landing page. I bet they are also award winning, and 150 best place to work at. Really shows they have no taste.

? I don't remember telling anyone to trust the reviews? I think it is healthy to try alternatives to Cloudflare and then come to your own decision.

I'm not saying you did, but for me things like what I mentioned are red flags. They also use C#—another red flag. There's OVH, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, etc—all are private companies that aren't on Wall Street.

Re: Questions for Cloudflare

#42

Post by colesantiago »

vlovich123 wrote: post #36
colesantiago wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bunny has raised money from VC which indicates it’s going the “Wall Street” path. Yet it is an available alternative to Cloudflare that is not on Wall Street (a public company). If you want to do this 100% yourself there is Apache Traffic Control. https://github.com/apache/trafficcontrol > Anubis is a bot firewall not a CDN. For now. If we support alternatives they can grow into an open source CDN.

Anubis is a piece of software not a CDN service. You realize to run a CDN you have to buy massive amounts of bandwidth and computers? DIY here belies a misunderstanding of what it takes to be DOS resistant and also what it takes to actually have CDN deliver a performance benefit.

This is a great idea for Anubis, funding future development and it being an alternative CDN.

Customers on the enterprise plan can either use Anubis's Managed CDN or host Anubis themselves via a enterprise license!

They can directly receive tech support from the creator of Anubis. (as long as they pay on the enterprise plan)

I don't see a problem with this and it can turn Anubis from "a piece of software" into a CDN.

Re: Questions for Cloudflare

#43

Post by Nextgrid »

stronglikedan wrote: post #34
Nextgrid wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil’s advocate: I operate the equivalent of an online lemonade stand, some shitty service at a cheap price offered with little guarantees (“if I fuck up I’ll refund you the price of your ‘lemonade’”) for hobbyists to use to host their blog and Visa decides to use it in their critical path. Then this “lemonade stand” goes down. Do you think it’s fair to blame me? I never chose to be part of Visa’s authorization loop…

> Do you think it’s fair to blame me? Absolutely, yes. Where's your backup plan for when Visa doesn't behave as you expect? It's okay to not have one, but it's also your fault for not having one, and that is the sole reason that the lemonade stand went down.

> Where's your backup plan for when Visa doesn't behave as you expect?

I don’t have (nor have to have) such a plan, I offer X service with Y guarantees paying out Z dollars if I don’t hold up my part of the bargain. In this hypothetical situation if Visa signs up I assumed they wanted to host their marketing website or some low-hanging fruit, it’s not my job to check what they’re using it for (in fact it would be preferable for me not to check, as I’d be seeing unencrypted card numbers and PII otherwise).

Re: Questions for Cloudflare

#44

Post by kqr »

blixt wrote: post #11

It's a bit odd to come from the outside to judge the internal process of an organization with many very complex moving parts, only a fraction of which we have been given context for, especially so soon after the incident and the post-mortem explaining it. I think the ultimate judgement must come from whether we will stay with Cloudflare now that we have seen how bad it can get. One could also say that this level of o…

> how these ideas were actively used by the author at e.g. Tradera or Loop54.

This would be preferable, of course. Unfortunately both organisations were rather secretive about their technical and social deficiencies and I don't want to be the one to air them out like that.

Re: Questions for Cloudflare

#45

Post by raincole »

wongarsu wrote: post #39
psim1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is unfair to blame Cloudflare (or AWS, or Azure, or GitHub) for what’s happening > Ultimately end-users don’t have a relationship with any of those companies. They have relationships with businesses that chose to rely on them Could you not say this about any supplier relationship? No, in this case, we all know the root of the outage is CloudFlare, so it absolutely makes sense to blame CloudFlare, and not their c…

Don't we say that about all supplier relationships? If my Samsung washing machine stops working I blame Samsung. Even when it turns out that it was a broken drive belt I don't blame the manufacturer of the drive belt, or whoever produced the rubber that went into the drive belt, or whoever made the machine involved in the production of this batch of rubber. Samsung choose to put the drive belt in my washing machine,…

> Don't we say that about all supplier relationships?

No always. If the farm sells packs of poisoned bacon to the supermarket, we blame the farm.

It's more about if the website/supermarket can reasonably do the QA.

Re: Questions for Cloudflare

#46

Post by [deleted] »

colesantiago wrote: post #31
vlovich123 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bunny has raised money from VC which indicates it’s going the “Wall Street” path. Anubis is a bot firewall not a CDN.

> Bunny has raised money from VC which indicates it’s going the “Wall Street” path. Yet it is an available alternative to Cloudflare that is not on Wall Street (a public company). If you want to do this 100% yourself there is Apache Traffic Control. https://github.com/apache/trafficcontrol > Anubis is a bot firewall not a CDN. For now. If we support alternatives they can grow into an open source CDN.

[deleted]

Re: Questions for Cloudflare

#47

Post by kqr »

tptacek wrote: post #4

It's a detailed postmortem published within a couple hours of the incident and this blog post is disappointed that it didn't provide a comprehensive assessment of all the procedural changes inside the engineering organization that came as a consequence. At the point in time when this blog post was written, it would not have been possible for them to answer these questions.

Part of my argument in the article is that it does't take long to come to that realisation if using the right methods. It would absolutely have been possible to identify the problem of missing feedback by that time.

Re: Questions for Cloudflare

#48

Post by HumanOstrich »

colesantiago wrote: post #42
vlovich123 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anubis is a piece of software not a CDN service. You realize to run a CDN you have to buy massive amounts of bandwidth and computers? DIY here belies a misunderstanding of what it takes to be DOS resistant and also what it takes to actually have CDN deliver a performance benefit.

This is a great idea for Anubis, funding future development and it being an alternative CDN. Customers on the enterprise plan can either use Anubis's Managed CDN or host Anubis themselves via a enterprise license! They can directly receive tech support from the creator of Anubis. (as long as they pay on the enterprise plan) I don't see a problem with this and it can turn Anubis from "a piece of software" into a CDN.

Has anyone from the Anubis project said anything about aspiring to transform into a CDN?

Re: Questions for Cloudflare

#49

Post by jsnell »

cogman10 wrote: post #35
timenotwasted wrote: post #9

"I don’t know. I wish technical organisations would be more thorough in investigating accidents." - This is just armchair quarterbacking at this point given that they were forthcoming during the incident and had a detailed post-mortem shortly after. The issue is that by not being a fly on the wall in the war room the OP is making massive assumptions about the level of discussions that take place about these types of…

People outside of tech (and some inside) can be really bad at understanding how something like this could slip through the cracks. Reading cloudflare's description of the problem, this is something that I could easily see my own company missing. It's the case that a file got too big which tanked performance enough to bring everything down. That's a VERY hard thing to test for. Especially since this appears to have be…

I don't believe that is an accurate description of the issue. It wasn't that the system got too slow due to a big file, it's that the file getting too big was treated as a fatal error rather than causing requests to fail open.

Re: Questions for Cloudflare

#50

Post by akerl_ »

colesantiago wrote: post #42
vlovich123 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anubis is a piece of software not a CDN service. You realize to run a CDN you have to buy massive amounts of bandwidth and computers? DIY here belies a misunderstanding of what it takes to be DOS resistant and also what it takes to actually have CDN deliver a performance benefit.

This is a great idea for Anubis, funding future development and it being an alternative CDN. Customers on the enterprise plan can either use Anubis's Managed CDN or host Anubis themselves via a enterprise license! They can directly receive tech support from the creator of Anubis. (as long as they pay on the enterprise plan) I don't see a problem with this and it can turn Anubis from "a piece of software" into a CDN.

Maybe they can also start a marketplace to buy and sell digital goods, like NFTs.
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