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Cloudflare is one control plane, but it's 1) anycast 2) over 100 locations 3) multiple servers per site. The SPOF with Cloudflare is either your account gettin

by rdl 8y ago

Cloudflare is one control plane, but it's 1) anycast 2) over 100 locations 3) multiple servers per site. The SPOF with Cloudflare is either your account getting hacked, or (much less likely) a CF control plane/configuration outage. Someone could probably build a better DNS provider than Cloudflare, at least for their specific site, but it would be difficult. I don't know of any other DNS provider I'd consider more robust, particularly against high load, DoS, etc. (Disclaimer: worked for Cloudflare 2014-2016)

zzzcpan 8y ago
This is rather weird claim. Getting your account hacked is the least of your worries, when every single thing is maintained by a single organization, a single team, on a single autonomous system, with lots of reliance on single hardware and software components. This is basically three nines level stuff, with hours of downtime per year on average. It's relatively easy to do better than that with do-it-yourself CDN using DNS-routed multiple independent hosting providers for edge nodes, getting to four, five nines level. (and DNS separately is not worth talking about, because it has built in redundancy, anything will always be more reliable than a centralized DNS provider)
- viraptor 8y ago
  > with lots of reliance on single hardware and software components Are your saying you have inside knowledge and that's the architecture? (I'm guessing no)
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    I've never seen any company use completely different software or hardware for each redundant instance of a service, so it's a pretty good bet CloudFlare isn't doing this either.
    - close04 8y ago
      That would imply a SPOF. One component of any kind that can take down the whole thing. The only such “component” I can think of is a human, not a technical one.
      - zzzcpan 8y ago
        I meant single kind of component, not one thing handling everything. If you use juniper routers, for example, a juniper specific software, hardware problem or a mistaken assumption about juniper specifics could take down all routers and an entire network.
        close04 8y ago
        Usually any kind of such issue wouldn’t take out every component of a type unless user error is involved. Like deploying the wrong policy to all devices. Which again comes back to humans being the weakest link. I can’t really imagine a particular hardware problem that would kill all components at once. This being said I probably didn’t experience all possible problems so far :).
        peterwwillis 8y ago
        Sure, humans are the weakest link, who cares? Regardless of the cause of the failure, catastrophic cascades are more likely if the systems and operations involved are homogeneous. That's why evolution prefers diversity.
        close04 8y ago
        Natural evolution. Because it follows vastly different rules. I still fail to see any example given for how one “cascade failure” takes down all the routers in an infrastructure like Cloudflare’s. I can think of a dozen ways a non-homogeneous system can fail (like incompatible updates and config, confusions between the types of components, etc.). In the end you usually end up with massive expenditure that introduces just as many problems as it solves. You may be onto something that nobody else spotted but so far the arguments are too generic (“failure”) or incompatible with the premise (rules of natural evolution applied to very artificial systems). Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to learn something new and understand a different point of view but so far the arguments don’t help me.

by rdl 8y ago

zzzcpan 8y ago

This is rather weird claim. Getting your account hacked is the least of your worries, when every single thing is maintained by a single organization, a single team, on a single autonomous system, with lots of reliance on single hardware and software components. This is basically three nines level stuff, with hours of downtime per year on average. It's relatively easy to do better than that with do-it-yourself CDN using DNS-routed multiple independent hosting providers for edge nodes, getting to four, five nines level. (and DNS separately is not worth talking about, because it has built in redundancy, anything will always be more reliable than a centralized DNS provider)

viraptor 8y ago
> with lots of reliance on single hardware and software components Are your saying you have inside knowledge and that's the architecture? (I'm guessing no)
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  I've never seen any company use completely different software or hardware for each redundant instance of a service, so it's a pretty good bet CloudFlare isn't doing this either.
  - close04 8y ago
    That would imply a SPOF. One component of any kind that can take down the whole thing. The only such “component” I can think of is a human, not a technical one.
    - zzzcpan 8y ago
      I meant single kind of component, not one thing handling everything. If you use juniper routers, for example, a juniper specific software, hardware problem or a mistaken assumption about juniper specifics could take down all routers and an entire network.
      - close04 8y ago
        Usually any kind of such issue wouldn’t take out every component of a type unless user error is involved. Like deploying the wrong policy to all devices. Which again comes back to humans being the weakest link. I can’t really imagine a particular hardware problem that would kill all components at once. This being said I probably didn’t experience all possible problems so far :).
        peterwwillis 8y ago
        Sure, humans are the weakest link, who cares? Regardless of the cause of the failure, catastrophic cascades are more likely if the systems and operations involved are homogeneous. That's why evolution prefers diversity.
        close04 8y ago
        Natural evolution. Because it follows vastly different rules. I still fail to see any example given for how one “cascade failure” takes down all the routers in an infrastructure like Cloudflare’s. I can think of a dozen ways a non-homogeneous system can fail (like incompatible updates and config, confusions between the types of components, etc.). In the end you usually end up with massive expenditure that introduces just as many problems as it solves. You may be onto something that nobody else spotted but so far the arguments are too generic (“failure”) or incompatible with the premise (rules of natural evolution applied to very artificial systems). Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to learn something new and understand a different point of view but so far the arguments don’t help me.