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I suppose this is at the top of HN as CloudFlare is quickly become a centralized point of failure for big parts of the internet, even without counting the CDN,

I suppose this is at the top of HN as CloudFlare is quickly become a centralized point of failure for big parts of the internet, even without counting the CDN, so large swaths are affected regardless if it's just a "minor" outage or not. Hence it's interesting enough to land at the top.

robertlagrant 3y ago
I wouldn't say it's a centralised point of failure. Many individual sites choose to use it, so it is used by big parts of the internet, but that doesn't make it centralised. Maybe a single point of failure.
- efdee 3y ago
  It's impossible for a single point of failure not to be centralised. Otherwise it wouldn't be a _single_ point of failure.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Of course it is. If a million websites are built with Flask then a bug in Flask affects all of them. If a million websites individually decide to use Cloudflare then Cloudflare affects them all. But that doesn't mean Cloudflare is built in a centralised way (I assume it isn't), nor that there's something about the internet that is centralised around Cloudflare. Rather, people are choosing to include it as a dependency in their stack.
    - efdee 3y ago
      Using a piece of software is not the same as using an online service. If all those websites are using Flask, that would be the equivalent of centralising on Flask. The opposite of that would be many Flask-compatible yet unrelated other frameworks being used in parallel. A bug in Flask would not affect those not using that very codebase. The centralisation people are speaking of here is the amount of people all putting their eggs in Cloudflare's basket.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        > If all those websites are using Flask, that would be the equivalent of centralising on Flask I agree on the equivalence between this and Cloudflare use, but not that this should be described as centralisation, which is a particularly potent word on the open web. Popularity isn't the same as centralisation. Each website could rewrite to remove Flask if they wanted. Another example: if lots of people watch Squid Game, that doesn't indicate a centralisation of television programmes. No options are removed. People are just choosing to do a similar thing, but not in a way that centralises anything.
    - p4bl0 3y ago
      In your example Flask would be a single point of failure and could indeed be called decentralized. For example websites can individually patch their Flask installation and come back up one by one, without depending on anyone else (at least once Flask is fixed). Here with Cloudflare, a single entity is responsible for the fix and will more or less fix the failure for every sites that uses it at the same time, by fixing it on their side. And website individually cannot do anything on their own. So I would argue it makes sense to call that centralized, at least from a structural/operational perspective. It is at the very least a form of contraction of the network.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        From an operational perspective it's just a supplier like any other. Lots of suppliers are involved in a business's website. That doesn't make it centralised, though? > It is at the very least a form of contraction of the network. I think it's that at most. No one has to use them, as they accelerate / enhance open protocols. That is the least lock-in one could hope for, so they don't contract anything in a negative way. Contrast with, say, Etsy/Shopify, who actively try to replace the open space with closed ones.
        starttoaster 3y ago
        It seems like you two are arguing different perspectives on the word centralization without conceding that a term can be relative to a viewpoint.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        But every word can be relative to that? I don't see where we'd go with that. I do think it's how the word relates to the topic that's interesting, if that's what you mean, but I think we are trying to get at that (-:
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >It's impossible for a single point of failure not to be centralised. Is a monoculture centralized? It doesn't have to be, and yet it can all fail due to a single fault.
- activiation 3y ago
  There are so many websites using it that it is basically the same as being centralized.
  - sgt 3y ago
    So many sites using Flask across the web is centralized?
    - activiation 3y ago
      If most sites were using Flask and forced to do broken updates, it would be a centralized problem.
    - r4indeer 3y ago
      You're comparing apples to oranges. Flask is software of which all instances run independent of each other while Cloudflare is SaaS where all its sites depend on the same service. If Cloudflare goes down, so does a significant portion of the web. Flask cannot have an outage like Cloudflare. All they can do is push a faulty update, but even then you can rollback or stay on the old version.
      - tetha 3y ago
        > If Cloudflare goes down, so does a significant portion of the web. Flask cannot have an outage like Cloudflare. All they can do is push a faulty update, but even then you can rollback or stay on the old version. This is what was on the tip of my tongue. I'd argue you're missing the portion of control in this whole discussion, and how much process you can place in front of a component change. If I have a flask dependency, I have a lot of control over this dependency. If flask screws up badly, I have many options: I can update. I can not update. I can downgrade. In fact, I could fork flask internally and fix it on my own and either be a good citizen and open up a PR, or I could be something else. I can test all of this in any number of environments before it hits a customer, and even more stages before it hits all customers. With Cloudflare - or any number of Hosters as well, like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, I have very little control. If I use Cloudflare as a CDN and Cloudflare goes down, I might not have the capacities at my upstream server to handle the load from all my customers, so I am down as long as Cloudflare is down. I wouldn't have the footprint available necessary to replace AWS in our own private DCs, even if we pooled all spare capacities - and then I'd still have to find a way to exfil our data from a downed AWS. (Which, yes, we have, but it'll take long hours) And no matter how much I test, if my hoster fucks up, I'm immediately fucked as well, no matter what processes I might have. The only process around this would be provider independence, which is really expensive and a lot of effort even if you just have a luke-warm standby.
NicoJuicy 3y ago
There's also the perception issue that if the host fails, it most likely isn't cloudflare although cloudflare gives a warning. Note: experienced it from the first row, cloud had an issue in a region with SSL...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
cyanydeez 3y ago
BUT THE INTERNET IS SUPPOSE TO ROUTE AROUND TTHIS STUFF. Remember when crypto promised a decentralized utopia of distributed systems that any interference wouldnt work, but slowly but surely it all congregated into a couple of oligarchical companies? Surely by now the technology of the internet has matured enough that these conglomerates are going to do the same but with a bit less fraud involved.
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  The internet does work around issues at the inter-networking layer through BGP and similar protocols, though the same resilience is sadly absent at the higher layers.
- dangerlibrary 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol BGP was standardized in 1989 and has been in use since 1994. The technology of the internet has matured in many ways, and remains almost identical in many others. Sometimes Microsoft is right, and backwards compatibility is the killer feature.
- sph 3y ago
  WTF has crypto got to do with centralisation of the Internet? The Internet is well-decentralised, but if every Joe Blogg has to put their website behind Cloudflare, it's not the Internet's fault, let alone crypto (?). Stop putting every-bloody-thing behind Cloudflare, and the problem solves itself. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I read of someone on HN seriously saying that they need a CDN for their personal website, or that they really need to use AWS or GCP for that matter. We tech workers have lost the plot, and it's our fault it's all in the hands of the few.
  - pluto_modadic 3y ago
    I think they're referencing when "distributed" exchanges still went down when particular APIs or domains were unreachable. It ain't fault tolerant unless it's piracy >:D
- 3y ago
MichaelZuo 3y ago
Is there some sort of backup/failsafe mechanism for sites that use Cloudflare?
- viraptor 3y ago
  Depends how badly they fail. To take the full advantage of CF you need to keep your DNS with them. That means if you can't configure any changes, you can't quickly move to another provider either. Your only solution at that point is to transfer the whole domain, but that may also require CF's assistance. (Unless they don't handle your apex domain) Effectively unless they're down for more than a day, you're better off taking the hit and waiting for them to resolve everything.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    > Effectively unless they're down for more than a day, you're better off taking the hit and waiting for them to resolve everything. lol. There's me worrying about a 2 minute downtime once every 10 years
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - gerdesj 3y ago
      Well I've managed ~53.5 years uptime with zero downtime so far 8) I'm taking the piss too. Care to explain? PS For a laugh (and I apologize for going dreadfully off topic), I asked ChatGPT a couple of questions regarding two mins and 10 years, just in case I'd missed a trick with your comment. I got two calculations within both answers that looked the same but have a factor of 10 difference in the result! https://chat.openai.com/share/7aaa80e5-1c54-4ac2-9ddb-9e488d1757bd https://chat.openai.com/share/7aaa80e5-1c54-4ac2-9ddb-9e488d... This is where it goes wrong: "Total minutes in 10 years = 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year * 10 years = 525,600 minutes" "Total time in 10 years = 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year * 10 years = 5,256,000 minutes" LO Calc says that =6024365*10 = 5,256,000. The worrying thing for me is that an awful lot of input training data might be badly wrong to cause this result or perhaps I've managed to excise a corner case in which case the training data is a bit too focussed in this particular regard. I suspect that arithmetic errors for these things will be awful because there are so many ways to screw up and the training data will have a lot of errors in it. Combine that with the number of subjects available and it will be a shit show.
dahfizz 3y ago
Anecdotally: op guessed right - I was only interested because of the HN and reddit outages

robertlagrant 3y ago

I wouldn't say it's a centralised point of failure. Many individual sites choose to use it, so it is used by big parts of the internet, but that doesn't make it centralised. Maybe a single point of failure.

efdee 3y ago
It's impossible for a single point of failure not to be centralised. Otherwise it wouldn't be a _single_ point of failure.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Of course it is. If a million websites are built with Flask then a bug in Flask affects all of them. If a million websites individually decide to use Cloudflare then Cloudflare affects them all. But that doesn't mean Cloudflare is built in a centralised way (I assume it isn't), nor that there's something about the internet that is centralised around Cloudflare. Rather, people are choosing to include it as a dependency in their stack.
  - efdee 3y ago
    Using a piece of software is not the same as using an online service. If all those websites are using Flask, that would be the equivalent of centralising on Flask. The opposite of that would be many Flask-compatible yet unrelated other frameworks being used in parallel. A bug in Flask would not affect those not using that very codebase. The centralisation people are speaking of here is the amount of people all putting their eggs in Cloudflare's basket.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > If all those websites are using Flask, that would be the equivalent of centralising on Flask I agree on the equivalence between this and Cloudflare use, but not that this should be described as centralisation, which is a particularly potent word on the open web. Popularity isn't the same as centralisation. Each website could rewrite to remove Flask if they wanted. Another example: if lots of people watch Squid Game, that doesn't indicate a centralisation of television programmes. No options are removed. People are just choosing to do a similar thing, but not in a way that centralises anything.
  - p4bl0 3y ago
    In your example Flask would be a single point of failure and could indeed be called decentralized. For example websites can individually patch their Flask installation and come back up one by one, without depending on anyone else (at least once Flask is fixed). Here with Cloudflare, a single entity is responsible for the fix and will more or less fix the failure for every sites that uses it at the same time, by fixing it on their side. And website individually cannot do anything on their own. So I would argue it makes sense to call that centralized, at least from a structural/operational perspective. It is at the very least a form of contraction of the network.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      From an operational perspective it's just a supplier like any other. Lots of suppliers are involved in a business's website. That doesn't make it centralised, though? > It is at the very least a form of contraction of the network. I think it's that at most. No one has to use them, as they accelerate / enhance open protocols. That is the least lock-in one could hope for, so they don't contract anything in a negative way. Contrast with, say, Etsy/Shopify, who actively try to replace the open space with closed ones.
      - starttoaster 3y ago
        It seems like you two are arguing different perspectives on the word centralization without conceding that a term can be relative to a viewpoint.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        But every word can be relative to that? I don't see where we'd go with that. I do think it's how the word relates to the topic that's interesting, if that's what you mean, but I think we are trying to get at that (-:
- pixl97 3y ago
  >It's impossible for a single point of failure not to be centralised. Is a monoculture centralized? It doesn't have to be, and yet it can all fail due to a single fault.
activiation 3y ago
There are so many websites using it that it is basically the same as being centralized.
- sgt 3y ago
  So many sites using Flask across the web is centralized?
  - activiation 3y ago
    If most sites were using Flask and forced to do broken updates, it would be a centralized problem.
  - r4indeer 3y ago
    You're comparing apples to oranges. Flask is software of which all instances run independent of each other while Cloudflare is SaaS where all its sites depend on the same service. If Cloudflare goes down, so does a significant portion of the web. Flask cannot have an outage like Cloudflare. All they can do is push a faulty update, but even then you can rollback or stay on the old version.
    - tetha 3y ago
      > If Cloudflare goes down, so does a significant portion of the web. Flask cannot have an outage like Cloudflare. All they can do is push a faulty update, but even then you can rollback or stay on the old version. This is what was on the tip of my tongue. I'd argue you're missing the portion of control in this whole discussion, and how much process you can place in front of a component change. If I have a flask dependency, I have a lot of control over this dependency. If flask screws up badly, I have many options: I can update. I can not update. I can downgrade. In fact, I could fork flask internally and fix it on my own and either be a good citizen and open up a PR, or I could be something else. I can test all of this in any number of environments before it hits a customer, and even more stages before it hits all customers. With Cloudflare - or any number of Hosters as well, like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, I have very little control. If I use Cloudflare as a CDN and Cloudflare goes down, I might not have the capacities at my upstream server to handle the load from all my customers, so I am down as long as Cloudflare is down. I wouldn't have the footprint available necessary to replace AWS in our own private DCs, even if we pooled all spare capacities - and then I'd still have to find a way to exfil our data from a downed AWS. (Which, yes, we have, but it'll take long hours) And no matter how much I test, if my hoster fucks up, I'm immediately fucked as well, no matter what processes I might have. The only process around this would be provider independence, which is really expensive and a lot of effort even if you just have a luke-warm standby.

NicoJuicy 3y ago

There's also the perception issue that if the host fails, it most likely isn't cloudflare although cloudflare gives a warning. Note: experienced it from the first row, cloud had an issue in a region with SSL...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

cyanydeez 3y ago

BUT THE INTERNET IS SUPPOSE TO ROUTE AROUND TTHIS STUFF. Remember when crypto promised a decentralized utopia of distributed systems that any interference wouldnt work, but slowly but surely it all congregated into a couple of oligarchical companies? Surely by now the technology of the internet has matured enough that these conglomerates are going to do the same but with a bit less fraud involved.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago
The internet does work around issues at the inter-networking layer through BGP and similar protocols, though the same resilience is sadly absent at the higher layers.
dangerlibrary 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol BGP was standardized in 1989 and has been in use since 1994. The technology of the internet has matured in many ways, and remains almost identical in many others. Sometimes Microsoft is right, and backwards compatibility is the killer feature.
sph 3y ago
WTF has crypto got to do with centralisation of the Internet? The Internet is well-decentralised, but if every Joe Blogg has to put their website behind Cloudflare, it's not the Internet's fault, let alone crypto (?). Stop putting every-bloody-thing behind Cloudflare, and the problem solves itself. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I read of someone on HN seriously saying that they need a CDN for their personal website, or that they really need to use AWS or GCP for that matter. We tech workers have lost the plot, and it's our fault it's all in the hands of the few.
- pluto_modadic 3y ago
  I think they're referencing when "distributed" exchanges still went down when particular APIs or domains were unreachable. It ain't fault tolerant unless it's piracy >:D
3y ago

MichaelZuo 3y ago

Is there some sort of backup/failsafe mechanism for sites that use Cloudflare?

viraptor 3y ago
Depends how badly they fail. To take the full advantage of CF you need to keep your DNS with them. That means if you can't configure any changes, you can't quickly move to another provider either. Your only solution at that point is to transfer the whole domain, but that may also require CF's assistance. (Unless they don't handle your apex domain) Effectively unless they're down for more than a day, you're better off taking the hit and waiting for them to resolve everything.
- ta1243 3y ago
  > Effectively unless they're down for more than a day, you're better off taking the hit and waiting for them to resolve everything. lol. There's me worrying about a 2 minute downtime once every 10 years
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - gerdesj 3y ago
    Well I've managed ~53.5 years uptime with zero downtime so far 8) I'm taking the piss too. Care to explain? PS For a laugh (and I apologize for going dreadfully off topic), I asked ChatGPT a couple of questions regarding two mins and 10 years, just in case I'd missed a trick with your comment. I got two calculations within both answers that looked the same but have a factor of 10 difference in the result! https://chat.openai.com/share/7aaa80e5-1c54-4ac2-9ddb-9e488d1757bd https://chat.openai.com/share/7aaa80e5-1c54-4ac2-9ddb-9e488d... This is where it goes wrong: "Total minutes in 10 years = 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year * 10 years = 525,600 minutes" "Total time in 10 years = 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year * 10 years = 5,256,000 minutes" LO Calc says that =6024365*10 = 5,256,000. The worrying thing for me is that an awful lot of input training data might be badly wrong to cause this result or perhaps I've managed to excise a corner case in which case the training data is a bit too focussed in this particular regard. I suspect that arithmetic errors for these things will be awful because there are so many ways to screw up and the training data will have a lot of errors in it. Combine that with the number of subjects available and it will be a shit show.

dahfizz 3y ago

Anecdotally: op guessed right - I was only interested because of the HN and reddit outages