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There is no CDN monopoly. There are several to choose from. Cloudflare is one of the new kids on the block. There is no cloud monopoly either. Customers can ch

There is no CDN monopoly. There are several to choose from. Cloudflare is one of the new kids on the block. There is no cloud monopoly either. Customers can choose from AWS, GCP, Azure, and several others. The problem is not market concentration. There are plenty of options. The problem is customers choosing to put all their eggs in one basket.

jonplackett 6y ago
How do you do a fallback from cloudflare failing when they’re your dns provider too? Any redirection around would take too long to change wouldn’t it? They’d be back up and running before it was implemented. What’s the right approach?
- 0xEFF 6y ago
  Don't use them for DNS, just point 60 second TTL A records at them.
  - phire 6y ago
    I don't think cloudflare supports such a configuration. The DNS is part of the load balancing, they serve different IPs based on location of the DNS query. Edit: Apparently they do support a CNAME configuration if you pay for one of their business plans. That gives you the option to quickly switch away (if your TTL is low enough) but will impact performance by having to fetch the CNAME every 60 seconds.
    - EE84M3i 6y ago
      Does cloudflare actually do geo-loadbalancing via DNS A records now? For years they only did anycast, unlike, say, Akamai, which hands out different IPs for each POP.
      - phire 6y ago
        Actually, I'm not sure if they do any DNS geo-loadbalancing. I've seen it report different IPs from different locations at times, but that could be something else. But I'm pretty sure they use DNS do other loadbalancing and DDoS mitigations. For example, if a site is under attack, they can send it to different IP addresses to keep it away from other sites. Or if someone is directly targeting a cloudlflare IP with a DDoS, they can redirect all sites to other IPs and just blackhole that IP.
  - jniedrauer 6y ago
    Where do you put your DNS servers? On-prem is going to be less reliable than cloudflare which has a 100% uptime SLA. I doubt your local ops team can compete.
    - jonplackett 6y ago
      my thoughts exactly. still none the wiser what the solution is.
- aaronax 6y ago
  For starters, couldn't you have name servers at multiple "places" for your domain? Name servers 1 at Amazon and nameserver 2 at Azure, for example. Shouldn't be too hard to build an abstraction layer that updates them all when you need to make changes.
david-cako 6y ago
True, however at AWS at least, customers are specifically told "multi-cloud doesn't allow you to fully leverage the benefits of AWS", whatever that means. It makes sense that cloud companies are inclined to keep customers from giving money to competitors, but they way they sell it and structure services, reserved instances, and enterprise discounts is such that you basically are putting all of your eggs in one basket.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  People are given the agency to make their own decisions. Nobody got fired for buying IBM, until they did.
- blahyawnblah 6y ago
  Probably means that if you use a service that only aws offers and you failover to a competitor your product/service/website will be degraded
- theptip 6y ago
  > "multi-cloud doesn't allow you to fully leverage the benefits of AWS", whatever that means. One of the selling points of cloud providers is managed services like SQS. If you run a multi-cloud architecture, you either can't use managed services, or have to build abstraction layers on top of them (and only use the features that exist in both cloud providers' versions of the managed service). If you want to use a managed service that only exists on AWS, then that's obviously incompatible with a fully multi-cloud architecture.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > If you run a multi-cloud architecture, you either can't use managed services, or have to build abstraction layers on top of them (and only use the features that exist in both cloud providers' versions of the managed service). And this is, of course, why they do everything they can do discourage it. Because if you do that, not only are you not reliant on them for availability, you can switch more of your business to the other provider(s) based on current pricing, and they do not want that big time.
contingencies 6y ago
The problem is customers choosing to put all their eggs in one basket. Until relatively recently absolutely none, and now almost none of the tooling allows effective multi-cloud or hybrid cloud/private. Basically the cloud providers work very hard to prevent the commodification of their services with special incompatible service offerings, lock-in, interdependency, deep and opaque APIs for integration, and networks of training and certification that position change as a direct threat to people's job security. Cloud providers today are basically Microsoft in the 90s. Much as open source challenged Microsoft, I would say that the world now needs open infrastructure tooling that positions hybrid and multi-cloud as first class infrastructure architectural cases in order to displace established cloud provider hegemony. Even then we will have to fight the hardware and real estate economies of scale available to large established cloud providers. I wrote some observations about this space based significantly on HN community comments prior to the rise of Docker a few years ago: http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/ http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/ ... click 'original' ... the conclusions still seem timely.
- abtinf 6y ago
  > Until relatively recently absolutely none, and now almost none of the tooling allows effective multi-cloud or hybrid cloud/private. Until relatively recently, the cloud didn't exist.
  - contingencies 6y ago
    EC2 was launched in 2006. The notes I linked to date from 2014.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    The cloud is marketing speak for what has been going on for decades. In the 70's, it was called time sharing.
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > Until relatively recently, the cloud didn't exist. Depends: > IBM and other mainframe providers conducted this kind of business in the following two decades [after 1961], often referred to as time-sharing, offering computing power and database storage to banks and other large organizations from their worldwide data centers. To facilitate this business model, mainframe operating systems evolved to include process control facilities, security, and user metering. […] > In 1998, HP set up the Utility Computing Division in Mountain View, CA, assigning former Bell Labs computer scientists to begin work on a computing power plant, incorporating multiple utilities to form a software stack. Services such as "IP billing-on-tap" were marketed. HP introduced the Utility Data Center in 2001. Sun announced the Sun Cloud service to consumers in 2000. […] > In spring 2006 3tera announced its AppLogic service and later that summer Amazon launched Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing
tootie 6y ago
Cloudflare has done really well in a short amount of time, but I'm sure Akamai is way bigger. Cloudflare is best known because they offer free/cheap tools for individuals and this post is targeted at developers. Most big enterprises I've worked with are on Akamai.

jonplackett 6y ago

How do you do a fallback from cloudflare failing when they’re your dns provider too? Any redirection around would take too long to change wouldn’t it? They’d be back up and running before it was implemented. What’s the right approach?

0xEFF 6y ago
Don't use them for DNS, just point 60 second TTL A records at them.
- phire 6y ago
  I don't think cloudflare supports such a configuration. The DNS is part of the load balancing, they serve different IPs based on location of the DNS query. Edit: Apparently they do support a CNAME configuration if you pay for one of their business plans. That gives you the option to quickly switch away (if your TTL is low enough) but will impact performance by having to fetch the CNAME every 60 seconds.
  - EE84M3i 6y ago
    Does cloudflare actually do geo-loadbalancing via DNS A records now? For years they only did anycast, unlike, say, Akamai, which hands out different IPs for each POP.
    - phire 6y ago
      Actually, I'm not sure if they do any DNS geo-loadbalancing. I've seen it report different IPs from different locations at times, but that could be something else. But I'm pretty sure they use DNS do other loadbalancing and DDoS mitigations. For example, if a site is under attack, they can send it to different IP addresses to keep it away from other sites. Or if someone is directly targeting a cloudlflare IP with a DDoS, they can redirect all sites to other IPs and just blackhole that IP.
- jniedrauer 6y ago
  Where do you put your DNS servers? On-prem is going to be less reliable than cloudflare which has a 100% uptime SLA. I doubt your local ops team can compete.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    my thoughts exactly. still none the wiser what the solution is.
aaronax 6y ago
For starters, couldn't you have name servers at multiple "places" for your domain? Name servers 1 at Amazon and nameserver 2 at Azure, for example. Shouldn't be too hard to build an abstraction layer that updates them all when you need to make changes.

david-cako 6y ago

True, however at AWS at least, customers are specifically told "multi-cloud doesn't allow you to fully leverage the benefits of AWS", whatever that means. It makes sense that cloud companies are inclined to keep customers from giving money to competitors, but they way they sell it and structure services, reserved instances, and enterprise discounts is such that you basically are putting all of your eggs in one basket.

Spooky23 6y ago
People are given the agency to make their own decisions. Nobody got fired for buying IBM, until they did.
blahyawnblah 6y ago
Probably means that if you use a service that only aws offers and you failover to a competitor your product/service/website will be degraded
theptip 6y ago
> "multi-cloud doesn't allow you to fully leverage the benefits of AWS", whatever that means. One of the selling points of cloud providers is managed services like SQS. If you run a multi-cloud architecture, you either can't use managed services, or have to build abstraction layers on top of them (and only use the features that exist in both cloud providers' versions of the managed service). If you want to use a managed service that only exists on AWS, then that's obviously incompatible with a fully multi-cloud architecture.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > If you run a multi-cloud architecture, you either can't use managed services, or have to build abstraction layers on top of them (and only use the features that exist in both cloud providers' versions of the managed service). And this is, of course, why they do everything they can do discourage it. Because if you do that, not only are you not reliant on them for availability, you can switch more of your business to the other provider(s) based on current pricing, and they do not want that big time.

contingencies 6y ago

The problem is customers choosing to put all their eggs in one basket. Until relatively recently absolutely none, and now almost none of the tooling allows effective multi-cloud or hybrid cloud/private. Basically the cloud providers work very hard to prevent the commodification of their services with special incompatible service offerings, lock-in, interdependency, deep and opaque APIs for integration, and networks of training and certification that position change as a direct threat to people's job security. Cloud providers today are basically Microsoft in the 90s. Much as open source challenged Microsoft, I would say that the world now needs open infrastructure tooling that positions hybrid and multi-cloud as first class infrastructure architectural cases in order to displace established cloud provider hegemony. Even then we will have to fight the hardware and real estate economies of scale available to large established cloud providers. I wrote some observations about this space based significantly on HN community comments prior to the rise of Docker a few years ago: http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/ http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/ ... click 'original' ... the conclusions still seem timely.

abtinf 6y ago
> Until relatively recently absolutely none, and now almost none of the tooling allows effective multi-cloud or hybrid cloud/private. Until relatively recently, the cloud didn't exist.
- contingencies 6y ago
  EC2 was launched in 2006. The notes I linked to date from 2014.
- icedchai 6y ago
  The cloud is marketing speak for what has been going on for decades. In the 70's, it was called time sharing.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > Until relatively recently, the cloud didn't exist. Depends: > IBM and other mainframe providers conducted this kind of business in the following two decades [after 1961], often referred to as time-sharing, offering computing power and database storage to banks and other large organizations from their worldwide data centers. To facilitate this business model, mainframe operating systems evolved to include process control facilities, security, and user metering. […] > In 1998, HP set up the Utility Computing Division in Mountain View, CA, assigning former Bell Labs computer scientists to begin work on a computing power plant, incorporating multiple utilities to form a software stack. Services such as "IP billing-on-tap" were marketed. HP introduced the Utility Data Center in 2001. Sun announced the Sun Cloud service to consumers in 2000. […] > In spring 2006 3tera announced its AppLogic service and later that summer Amazon launched Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing

tootie 6y ago

Cloudflare has done really well in a short amount of time, but I'm sure Akamai is way bigger. Cloudflare is best known because they offer free/cheap tools for individuals and this post is targeted at developers. Most big enterprises I've worked with are on Akamai.