4 ms·

Kind of ironic, there was a big "cloudflare is bad and a central point of failure" article on the front page just a couple days ago. Found it, https://news.yco

Kind of ironic, there was a big "cloudflare is bad and a central point of failure" article on the front page just a couple days ago. Found it, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31801947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31801947 edit: Not that I necessarily agree with the article even in light of there being an outage, cloudflare has been pretty good for us. Just thought it was interesting.

indy 4y ago
Brace yourself for a lot more of those kinds of articles in the next few days.
- sph 4y ago
  I welcome them. Perhaps these outages stop all people rushing to host their single HTML page blog through them.
  - indy 4y ago
    unfortunately their tentacles have penetrated deep into the internet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820929
- FlyingSnake 4y ago
  With titles like "Cloudflare considered bad"
sschueller 4y ago
Also ironic so many are blindly helping create "the great firewall of the USA" because it's easy and cheap.
- hericium 4y ago
  > "the great firewall of the USA" Not only the US.
rvz 4y ago
But web2 is going (really) great once you depend on Cloudflare. And it is certainly not re-centralizing the whole internet with a provider that is a single point of failure. /s
- balex 4y ago
  I can't tell if you're being cynical or actually mean it. Care to clarify so I could take the mandatory contrarian approach?
  - selcuka 4y ago
    /s means "end of sarcasm".
    - balex 4y ago
      Ah. Obviously. So yeah, how is a CDN centralizing your infra? You could just have your CNAMEs point to a different provider or directly to your gateways. Or you could even go down the multi CDN path, and have someone like ns1 automatically redirect your CNAMEs to an alternate CDN on a per-geo basis to overcome local failures. It's just another SaaS component in your system. You could self host if you're willing to take on the ownership challenge, and at certain scale it would even be more cost effective.
      - selcuka 4y ago
        Not the OP, but CloudFlare is not only a CDN but does everything you mentioned in your comment for you, so it's the load balancer and the DNS as well. When it goes down everything goes down. Technically you could set up a separate DNS/failover somewhere else and use a backup reverse proxy/TLS terminator/CDN SaaS similar to CloudFlare, but then that somewhere else will be your point of failure.
nabla9 4y ago
Mid 2000s one computer science professor said that internet capacity is not going to match the amount of traffic. Everybody laughed. The wold was full of dark fiber after dot-com-bust. But if you look at his math, it was correct. The era of client-server connected heterogeneous distributed Internet is just a side show today. The solution has been centralization (clarification: big companies run their own caches and networks near users). and growth of caches and then Cloudflare taking care of the rest.
- danachow 4y ago
  > The solution has been centralization and growth of caches. Centralization and growth of caches are on their face contradictory. Perhaps you mean organizational centralization but that really has nothing to do with internet capacity demands. Your hot take isn’t so brilliant. What’s fundamentally wrong with edge distribution?
  - nabla9 4y ago
    > Perhaps you mean organizational centralization Yes. This is exactly what I mean. Big companies run their own caches and networks near users. Cloudflare takes care of the rest. >What’s fundamentally wrong with edge distribution? You incorrectly assume judgement from my part. My point is that things have changed. New problems arise in solution to old problems. Fragility from small number of organizations running their caches to solve bandwidth problem.
ilaksh 4y ago
Cloudflare usually works great. That doesn't mean they aren't a central point of failure.

indy 4y ago

Brace yourself for a lot more of those kinds of articles in the next few days.

sph 4y ago
I welcome them. Perhaps these outages stop all people rushing to host their single HTML page blog through them.
- indy 4y ago
  unfortunately their tentacles have penetrated deep into the internet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820929
FlyingSnake 4y ago
With titles like "Cloudflare considered bad"

sschueller 4y ago

Also ironic so many are blindly helping create "the great firewall of the USA" because it's easy and cheap.

hericium 4y ago
> "the great firewall of the USA" Not only the US.

rvz 4y ago

But web2 is going (really) great once you depend on Cloudflare. And it is certainly not re-centralizing the whole internet with a provider that is a single point of failure. /s

balex 4y ago
I can't tell if you're being cynical or actually mean it. Care to clarify so I could take the mandatory contrarian approach?
- selcuka 4y ago
  /s means "end of sarcasm".
  - balex 4y ago
    Ah. Obviously. So yeah, how is a CDN centralizing your infra? You could just have your CNAMEs point to a different provider or directly to your gateways. Or you could even go down the multi CDN path, and have someone like ns1 automatically redirect your CNAMEs to an alternate CDN on a per-geo basis to overcome local failures. It's just another SaaS component in your system. You could self host if you're willing to take on the ownership challenge, and at certain scale it would even be more cost effective.
    - selcuka 4y ago
      Not the OP, but CloudFlare is not only a CDN but does everything you mentioned in your comment for you, so it's the load balancer and the DNS as well. When it goes down everything goes down. Technically you could set up a separate DNS/failover somewhere else and use a backup reverse proxy/TLS terminator/CDN SaaS similar to CloudFlare, but then that somewhere else will be your point of failure.

nabla9 4y ago

Mid 2000s one computer science professor said that internet capacity is not going to match the amount of traffic. Everybody laughed. The wold was full of dark fiber after dot-com-bust. But if you look at his math, it was correct. The era of client-server connected heterogeneous distributed Internet is just a side show today. The solution has been centralization (clarification: big companies run their own caches and networks near users). and growth of caches and then Cloudflare taking care of the rest.

danachow 4y ago
> The solution has been centralization and growth of caches. Centralization and growth of caches are on their face contradictory. Perhaps you mean organizational centralization but that really has nothing to do with internet capacity demands. Your hot take isn’t so brilliant. What’s fundamentally wrong with edge distribution?
- nabla9 4y ago
  > Perhaps you mean organizational centralization Yes. This is exactly what I mean. Big companies run their own caches and networks near users. Cloudflare takes care of the rest. >What’s fundamentally wrong with edge distribution? You incorrectly assume judgement from my part. My point is that things have changed. New problems arise in solution to old problems. Fragility from small number of organizations running their caches to solve bandwidth problem.

ilaksh 4y ago

Cloudflare usually works great. That doesn't mean they aren't a central point of failure.