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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”

#51

Post by KirinDave »

tyingq wrote: post #6

It's interesting to me that Cloudflare doesn't really have any competition with a similar business model. I suppose the free plan requires quite a lot of spending before the upgrades offset it.

AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all offer competitive alternatives for the small business sector. Personally, I find the actual cost of CloudFlare very difficult to reason about in advance of actual use. This is in part because it's easy to miss a bit of the a la carte model you need.

Full disclosure, I work at Google on the SRE team for Cloud CDN. If you want a credible alternative for the CDN part of Cloudflare, our product is extremely fast. We were all very sad for Cloudflare and watched the whole affair closely, as we've got a few customers that use our services alongside Cloudflare's.

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

#52

Post by NorwegianDude »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #43

Honest question: I've never really understood the back of the napkin math of how Cloudflare functions economically, which I feel would go a long way towards my understanding of why/how they were able to become such an integral and generally positive part of the Internet. Did they have some crazy in to get cheap bandwidth? Did they bet big on bandwidth prices falling? Did they figure something else out that nobody saw…

I don't really know, but I guess the biggest feature in the past was protection against DoS attacks.

Bandwidth isn't expensive compared to what most people are paying for it. Cloudflare is paying for the infrastructure as it is to handle attacks, so why not use it? As long as it doesn't affect paying customers then it's great marketing.

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

#53

Post by Semaphor »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #33
csharptwdec19 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the root cause (which, IMO, you correctly point out) is lost on many modern developers. For whatever reason there's this modern idea that if a company A is paying money to company B for a service, that company B will handle all the 'hard stuff' for them. The end result is we have a lot of applications/infra built with SPOFs, in some cases known, but in many, swept under the rug and abstracted away to passing…

"Your app will go down when half the Internet goes down" is not that big of a deal to most software companies, because: 1. no one's going to blame me if my app goes down when half the Internet is also down but they are going to blame me if my custom solution to the same thing causes an outage, 2. there's no way my custom solution is going to achieve the same uptime. AWS/Cloudflare/Azure are not perfect, but whatever…

Regarding 2, that’s exactly what the blog post was advocating for: Redundancy. They weren’t saying give up on Cloudflare (as they mentioned, they use it themselves).

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

#54

Post by tyingq »

KirinDave wrote: post #51
tyingq wrote: post #6

It's interesting to me that Cloudflare doesn't really have any competition with a similar business model. I suppose the free plan requires quite a lot of spending before the upgrades offset it.

AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all offer competitive alternatives for the small business sector. Personally, I find the actual cost of CloudFlare very difficult to reason about in advance of actual use. This is in part because it's easy to miss a bit of the a la carte model you need. Full disclosure, I work at Google on the SRE team for Cloud CDN. If you want a credible alternative for the CDN part of Cloudflare, our pr…

The jist of my comment is why nobody else has tried the "liberal free tier" model for a CDN, as it seems to be working for CF.

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

#55

Post by mfkp »

saagarjha wrote: post #34
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…

> Many of these companies should have had fail-over to competitors at least for reliability. How would you even set such a thing up? I fear that you might get a couple of collusionary companies that bail each other out and smaller providers might just be left out to dry…

Many DNS providers have the ability to do AXFR "zone transfers", so you can sync your records to a secondary provider and you would add a secondary set of nameservers for redundancy. Unfortunately Cloudflare doesn't offer this unless you pay for their Enterprise plan (they started offering it earlier this year).

I do love using CloudFlare for DNS, lots of great features and generally works well, but I wish they would support AXFR for the lower tiers. I've been working on a solution for this using the CloudFlare API, but we'll see how well it works out.

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

#56

Post by KirinDave »

tyingq wrote: post #54
KirinDave wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all offer competitive alternatives for the small business sector. Personally, I find the actual cost of CloudFlare very difficult to reason about in advance of actual use. This is in part because it's easy to miss a bit of the a la carte model you need. Full disclosure, I work at Google on the SRE team for Cloud CDN. If you want a credible alternative for the CDN part of Cloudflare, our pr…

The jist of my comment is why nobody else has tried the "liberal free tier" model for a CDN, as it seems to be working for CF.

Sure, but all 3 cloud providers have free tiers for this stuff, don't they?

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

#57

Post by KirinDave »

nerdponx wrote: post #10
tyingq wrote: post #6

It's interesting to me that Cloudflare doesn't really have any competition with a similar business model. I suppose the free plan requires quite a lot of spending before the upgrades offset it.

I don't need a free tier. I just need a "basic bitch" tier for my personal usage. Who are some Cloudflare alternatives for this?

If all you're doing is hosting and CDNing static content, the US cloud providers can do this very, very cheaply.

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

#58

Post by chronid »

sradman wrote: post #36
badRNG wrote: post #2

Interesting perspective, but it seems like this is just an ad for easyDNS and their "Proactive Nameservers," though I couldn't imagine a better time than the misstep of a behemoth of a competitor in this space. Not to detract from the more important discussion about the internet's dependence on Cloudflare overall.

It may be just an ad for easyDNS' Proactive Nameservers [1] product but it provides a roadmap for one possible solution to this type of problem. From a quick reading of the marketing info, the solution can be summarized as "Provision, Monitor, and Fail-Over DNS Name Servers across multiple DNS-as-a-Service providers". The question I have is whether the following constraint is artificially introduced or not: > We must…

> IIRC, Netflix OSS published some tools quite some time ago to support multiple DNS providers but I don't know/remember if they tackled the availability problem.

The classic way of doing this is AXFR (your own DNS server is a "hidden master" and the DNS providers are the slaves).

The problem is you won't be able to have redundancy at the registrar level, but that has historically at least been less of an issue.

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

#59

Post by Qub3d »

saagarjha wrote: post #34
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…

> Many of these companies should have had fail-over to competitors at least for reliability. How would you even set such a thing up? I fear that you might get a couple of collusionary companies that bail each other out and smaller providers might just be left out to dry…

The article posted actually talks about EasyDNS's implementation of exactly this.

> At easyDNS we experienced so much pain from this reality that we created a system to automate flipping DNS providers at the first sign of trouble.

> We call it Proactive Nameservers, and we’re the only company in the world doing it for some reason. Maybe this is because in order to provide a service like nameserver failover, it means a company has to admit to its customers the reality that their own nameservers may at some point, fail.

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

#60

Post by [deleted] »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #33
csharptwdec19 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the root cause (which, IMO, you correctly point out) is lost on many modern developers. For whatever reason there's this modern idea that if a company A is paying money to company B for a service, that company B will handle all the 'hard stuff' for them. The end result is we have a lot of applications/infra built with SPOFs, in some cases known, but in many, swept under the rug and abstracted away to passing…

"Your app will go down when half the Internet goes down" is not that big of a deal to most software companies, because: 1. no one's going to blame me if my app goes down when half the Internet is also down but they are going to blame me if my custom solution to the same thing causes an outage, 2. there's no way my custom solution is going to achieve the same uptime. AWS/Cloudflare/Azure are not perfect, but whatever…

[deleted]
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