So were going backwards to a world where there are basically 5 computers running everything and everyone is basically accessing the world through a dumb terminal.Even though the digital slab in our pockets has more compute than a roomful of the early gen devices. Hopefully critical infrashifts back to managed metal or private clouds - dont see it though with the last decades of cloud evangalism to move all legacy sys…
The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing
71–80 of 209 posts
Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing
#72Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing
#73Now just wait til every country on earth really does replace most of its employees with ChatGPT... and then OpenAI's data center goes offline with a fiber cut or something. All work everywhere stops. Cloudflare outage is nothing compared to that.
If a fiber cut brings your network down then you have fundamental network design issues and need to change hiring practices.
Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
the root cause is customers refusing to punish these downtime. Checkout how hard customers punish blackouts from the grid - both via wallet, but also via voting/gov't. It's why they are now more reliable. So unless the backbone infrastructure gets the same flak, nothing is going to change. After all, any change is expensive, and the cost of that change needs to be worth it.
Is a little downtime such a bad thing? Trying to avoid some bumps and bruises in your business has diminishing returns.
What are customers going to do? Go to competitor that's also down?
It is extremely annoying, will ruin your day, but as movie quote goes - if everyone is special, no one is.
Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing
#75The problem is far more nuanced than the internet simply becoming too centralised. I want to host my gas station network’s air machine infrastructure, and I only want people in the US to be able to access it. That simple task is literally impossible with what we have allowed the internet to become. FWIW I love Cloudflare’s products and make use of a large amount of them, but I can’t advocate for using them in my prof…
It takes time and effort for no gain in any sensible business goal. People outside of US won't need it, bad actors will spoof their location, and it might inconvenience your real customers.
And if you want a secure communication just setup zero-trust network.
Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is a little downtime such a bad thing? Trying to avoid some bumps and bruises in your business has diminishing returns.
What's "a little downtime" to you might be work ruined and day wasted for someone else.
Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing
#77Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing
#78Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing
#79My counter argument is that "centralization" in a technical sense isn't about what company owns things but how services are operated. Cloudflare is very decentralized.
Furthermore, I've seen regional outages caused by things like anchors dropped by ships in the wrong place, a shark eating a cable. Regional power outages caused by squirrels,etc... outages happen.
If everyone ran their own server from their own home, AT&T or Level3 could have an outage and still take out similar swathes of the internet.
With CDNs like cloudflare, if Level3 had an outage, your website won't be down because your home or VPS host's upstream transit happens to be Level3 (or whatever they call themselves these days) because your content (at least static) is cached globally.
The only real reasonable alternative is something like ipfs, web3 and similar talk.
Cloudflare has always called itself a content transport provider, think of it as such. But also, Cloudflare is just one player, there are several very big players. Every big cloud provider has a competing product, not to mention companies like Akamai.
People are rage posting about cloudflare, especially because it has made CDNs accessible to everyone. You can easily setup a free cloudflare account and be on your merry way. This isn't something you should be angry about. You're free to pay for any number of other cdns, many do.
If you don't like how Cloudflare has so much market share, then come up with a similarly competitive alternative and profit. Just this HN thread alone is enough for me to think there is a market for more players. Or, just spread the word about the competition that exists today. Use frontdoor, cloudfront, netlify, flycdn, akamai,etc... It's hardly a monopoly.
Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing
#80I'll die on the hill that centralization is more efficient than decentralization and that rare outages of hugely centralized systems that are otherwise highly reliable are much better than full decentralization with much worse reliability. In other words, when AWS or Cloudflare go down it's catastrophic in the sense that everyone sees the issues at the same time, but smaller providers usually have much more ongoing i…
Of course they are, the issue is what level of failure were going to accept.