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The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

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Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#81
post #21

The 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…

Is Cloudflare having more outages than aws, gcp or azure? Honestly curious, I don't know the answer.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#83
post #10

It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. As if a single person reading this post wasn't aware that the Internet is centralized, and couldn't name specifically a few sources of centralization (Cloudflare, AWS, Gmail, Github). As if it's the first time this happens. As if after the last time AWS failed (or the one before that, or one before…) anybody stopped using AWS. As if a…

With the rise in unfriendly bots on the internet as well as DDoS botnets reaching 15 Tbps, I don’t think many people have much of a choice.

The cynic in me wonders how much blame the world's leading vendor of DDoS prevention might share in the creation of that particularly problem

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#84
post #10

It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. As if a single person reading this post wasn't aware that the Internet is centralized, and couldn't name specifically a few sources of centralization (Cloudflare, AWS, Gmail, Github). As if it's the first time this happens. As if after the last time AWS failed (or the one before that, or one before…) anybody stopped using AWS. As if a…

It’s just a function of costs vs benefits. For most people, building redundancy at this layer costs far too much than the benefits.

If Cloudflare or AWS go down, the outage is usually so big that smaller players have an excuse and people accept that.

It’s as simple as that.

“Why isn’t your site working?” “Half the internet is down, here read this news article: …” “Oh, okay, let me know when it’s back!”

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#85
post #68

I'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…

Efficient in terms of what, exactly?

There are multiple dimensions to this problem. Putting everything behind Cloudflare might give you better uptime, reliability, performance, etc. but it also has the effect of centralizing power into the hands of a single entity. Instead of twisting the arms of ten different CXOs, your local politician now only needs to twist the arm of a single CXO to knock your entire business off the internet.

I live in India, where the government has always been hostile to the ideals of freedom of speech and expression. Complete internet blackouts are common in several states, and major ISPs block websites without due process or an appeals mechanism. Nobody is safe from this, not even Github[1]. In countries like India, decentralization is a preventative measure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#India

And I'm not even going to talk about abuse of monopoly power and all that. What happens when Cloudflare has their Apple moment? When they jack up their prices 10x, or refuse to serve customers that might use their CDNs to serve "inappropriate" content? When the definition of "inappropriate" is left fuzzy, so that it applies to everything from CSAM to political commentary?

No thanks.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#86
post #68

I'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…

Efficient in terms of what, exactly? There are multiple dimensions to this problem. Putting everything behind Cloudflare might give you better uptime, reliability, performance, etc. but it also has the effect of centralizing power into the hands of a single entity. Instead of twisting the arms of ten different CXOs, your local politician now only needs to twist the arm of a single CXO to knock your entire business of…

[deleted]

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#87
post #21

The 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…

Is Cloudflare having more outages than aws, gcp or azure? Honestly curious, I don't know the answer.

Definitely not.

I was a bit shocked when my mother called me for IT help and sent me a screenshot of a Cloudflare error page with Cloudflare being the broken link and not the server. I assumed it's a bug in the error page and told her that the server is down.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#90
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Is anyone else as confused as I am about how common anti-openness and anti-freedom comments are becoming on HN? I don’t even understand what this comment wants: Banning VPNs? Walling off the rest of the world from US internet? Strict government identity and citizenship…

> Is anyone else as confused as I am about how common anti-openness and anti-freedom comments are becoming on HN? In this specific case I don't think it's about being anti-open? It's that a business with only physical presence in one country selling a service that is only accessible physically inside the country.... doesn't.... have any need for selling compressed air to someone who isn't like 15 minutes away from on…

"only need US customers to be able to" vs "want non-US customers to be unable to"
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