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Cloudflare always does an excellent job of optimizing their writeups for large, diverse audiences. The prose of this article reminds me of an equally accessible

Cloudflare always does an excellent job of optimizing their writeups for large, diverse audiences. The prose of this article reminds me of an equally accessible discussion of BGP from a few months ago [1]. [1] http://blog.cloudflare.com/why-google-went-offline-today-and-a-bit-about http://blog.cloudflare.com/why-google-went-offline-today-and...

thatthatis 14y ago
Whether intentional or not, this is some of the best PR marketing copy I've ever seen. Large, diverse audiences who are afraid of their blog/app/site getting DDOSed can understand enough to know that Cloudflare has a credible solution to that which they fear. I really can't figure out from their writing whether this is altruism accidentally leading to great PR or phenomenal PR leading to the appearance of altruism.
- hhw 14y ago
  I'd definitely say it's the latter. The non-PR version of the blog post is that they buy transit and peer at public exchanges out of many locations. Just like every other CDN. I cannot find a single action mentioned in the entire post of something that CloudFlare actually did to help mitigate the attack. Basically, it seems that the Internet network community at large scrambled to deal with the problems, and CloudFlare is taking credit for it.
  - TranceMan 14y ago
    Basically, it seems that the Internet network community at large scrambled to deal with the problems, and CloudFlare is taking credit for it. This is true - if the Internet network community didn't identify this issue and see how they could mitigate it Cloudflare would have been toast. And now this blog post is number 1 on Hacker News...
  - robryan 14y ago
    They mitigated the attack against the site itself, forcing the attackers to move up the chain and try and target networks that connect to cloud flare. They also worked with these exchanges to mitigate the attack at that level. What more could they do?
- Tyrant505 14y ago
  Thank you for saying this.. Perhaps both? :) Then it's easy win.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  Good marketing is honestly communicating about a great product. Cloudflare has good marketing because they have a great product and their communications are honest. Marketing is only slimy when the product can't back up the boasts (which, unfortunately, is way too often).
  - TranceMan 14y ago
    Their great product? Is this their product [which they charge for and you are championing] the one that can mitigate DDoS attacks but failed to do so? Cloudflare got caught out offering something they cannot guarantee and failed to deliver - they are now currently blaming the 'Internet' - very sad...sorry it is late but the 'Internet' did not slow down today or almost break [as the title of this post would suggest] because Cloudflare and Spamhaus had a bad day...
    - jonknee 14y ago
      Did you read the story? It was more about how this wa a notable attack (because the traffic volume and how that we attained), not because it was particularly bad for CloudFare: > This allowed us to mitigate the attack without it affecting Spamhaus or any of our other customers. The attackers ceased their attack against the Spamhaus website four hours after it started.
      - TranceMan 14y ago
        Did you read the story? It was more about how this wa a notable attack (because the traffic volume and how that we attained), not because it was particularly bad for CloudFare: Yes I did - and still Cloudflare can claim to be able to defend against these 'attacks'? If they were being 'honest' they would come out and say they cannot defend themselves against the 'Internet' Edit: This allowed us to mitigate the attack without it affecting Spamhaus or any of our other customers So did the Internet slow down or break? Is this news?
        jonknee 14y ago
- jonknee 14y ago
  > I really can't figure out from their writing whether this is altruism accidentally leading to great PR or phenomenal PR leading to the appearance of altruism. I think it's a little of both, they also have great write ups when they screw up (rare, but it happens).
  - sirclueless 14y ago
    I think it's a virtuous cycle. Their selfish motives (attract top-notch employees, sell cloudflare to security-conscious techies) lead them to do impactful, altruistic things. Of course they are motivated by the PR, but what they do really helps and we are happy to reward them.
  - saurik 14y ago
    They only write a blog post, however, if they screw up so badly that the Internet takes notice; if they managed to get by because no one was certain what happened, or if it only affected some of their customers, and so the blame thereby largely got deflected to others, they are careful to remain quiet about the situation. For an example of such an incident, I had to spend a bunch of time debugging why CloudFlare's optimization service (which they apparently do not actually do tests for the code of) was causing WebKit browsers to entirely lock up late last year. http://www.saurik.com/id/14 http://www.saurik.com/id/14
    - jonknee 14y ago
      It beats the blog posts by anyone else with a large network. By a mile. Google will say they had an incident, Facebook will say nothing, CloudFare Will show you a graph of their fail.
      - saurik 14y ago
        I take it you haven't seen the blog posts by Amazon? They are always very interesting, very detailed, and they write them even if the effects only hit some features of a single availability zone. I have written about Amazon's postmortems in the past, with detailed links to examples. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4705110 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4705110 They also, of course, don't write blog posts for every single incident (as I point out in that previous post), but they do acknowledge incidents on their status pages, and they don't seem to filter their postmortems based on "can I turn this into a PR event" as CloudFlare does; in the example situation I provided that CloudFlare carefully ignored, Amazon would have posted something, even though it only would not have let them come off sounding like heroes. CloudFlare simply should not be getting happy hacker credit for these exaggerated tales of valor... this is just marketing copy, not a postmortem, and it isn't even clear that we should be believing any of the statements they have made. I mean, can you even imagine an Amazon postmortem requiring a rebuttle by gizmodo, as we see for this CloudFlare article? http://gizmodo.com/5992652 http://gizmodo.com/5992652
- Mahn 14y ago
  I wouldn't really call it PR, it seems to me they just genuinely enjoy writing about this stuff.
  - eastdakota 14y ago
    Yup. At first we didn't think anyone else would like our geeky ramblings. Always surprised the more technical detail we go into the more people are engaged.
    - rurounijones 14y ago
      More technical detail I think is always appreciated, it is a great learning experience reading those posts.
    - robryan 14y ago
      Yeah, a writeup where I can go do some research to understand is much better than one that glosses over the details with bad analogies and simplistic explanations.
  - youngtaff 14y ago
    It's definitely PR, also look at who submitted it to HN That said it's pretty interesting if you ignore the bits that sound like hype.
setheron 14y ago
I still found it a bit too high level for me, but on the other the topic doesn't interest me much.
deleted 14y ago
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thatthatis 14y ago

Whether intentional or not, this is some of the best PR marketing copy I've ever seen. Large, diverse audiences who are afraid of their blog/app/site getting DDOSed can understand enough to know that Cloudflare has a credible solution to that which they fear. I really can't figure out from their writing whether this is altruism accidentally leading to great PR or phenomenal PR leading to the appearance of altruism.

hhw 14y ago
I'd definitely say it's the latter. The non-PR version of the blog post is that they buy transit and peer at public exchanges out of many locations. Just like every other CDN. I cannot find a single action mentioned in the entire post of something that CloudFlare actually did to help mitigate the attack. Basically, it seems that the Internet network community at large scrambled to deal with the problems, and CloudFlare is taking credit for it.
- TranceMan 14y ago
  Basically, it seems that the Internet network community at large scrambled to deal with the problems, and CloudFlare is taking credit for it. This is true - if the Internet network community didn't identify this issue and see how they could mitigate it Cloudflare would have been toast. And now this blog post is number 1 on Hacker News...
- robryan 14y ago
  They mitigated the attack against the site itself, forcing the attackers to move up the chain and try and target networks that connect to cloud flare. They also worked with these exchanges to mitigate the attack at that level. What more could they do?
Tyrant505 14y ago
Thank you for saying this.. Perhaps both? :) Then it's easy win.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
Good marketing is honestly communicating about a great product. Cloudflare has good marketing because they have a great product and their communications are honest. Marketing is only slimy when the product can't back up the boasts (which, unfortunately, is way too often).
- TranceMan 14y ago
  Their great product? Is this their product [which they charge for and you are championing] the one that can mitigate DDoS attacks but failed to do so? Cloudflare got caught out offering something they cannot guarantee and failed to deliver - they are now currently blaming the 'Internet' - very sad...sorry it is late but the 'Internet' did not slow down today or almost break [as the title of this post would suggest] because Cloudflare and Spamhaus had a bad day...
  - jonknee 14y ago
    Did you read the story? It was more about how this wa a notable attack (because the traffic volume and how that we attained), not because it was particularly bad for CloudFare: > This allowed us to mitigate the attack without it affecting Spamhaus or any of our other customers. The attackers ceased their attack against the Spamhaus website four hours after it started.
    - TranceMan 14y ago
      Did you read the story? It was more about how this wa a notable attack (because the traffic volume and how that we attained), not because it was particularly bad for CloudFare: Yes I did - and still Cloudflare can claim to be able to defend against these 'attacks'? If they were being 'honest' they would come out and say they cannot defend themselves against the 'Internet' Edit: This allowed us to mitigate the attack without it affecting Spamhaus or any of our other customers So did the Internet slow down or break? Is this news?
      - jonknee 14y ago
jonknee 14y ago
> I really can't figure out from their writing whether this is altruism accidentally leading to great PR or phenomenal PR leading to the appearance of altruism. I think it's a little of both, they also have great write ups when they screw up (rare, but it happens).
- sirclueless 14y ago
  I think it's a virtuous cycle. Their selfish motives (attract top-notch employees, sell cloudflare to security-conscious techies) lead them to do impactful, altruistic things. Of course they are motivated by the PR, but what they do really helps and we are happy to reward them.
- saurik 14y ago
  They only write a blog post, however, if they screw up so badly that the Internet takes notice; if they managed to get by because no one was certain what happened, or if it only affected some of their customers, and so the blame thereby largely got deflected to others, they are careful to remain quiet about the situation. For an example of such an incident, I had to spend a bunch of time debugging why CloudFlare's optimization service (which they apparently do not actually do tests for the code of) was causing WebKit browsers to entirely lock up late last year. http://www.saurik.com/id/14 http://www.saurik.com/id/14
  - jonknee 14y ago
    It beats the blog posts by anyone else with a large network. By a mile. Google will say they had an incident, Facebook will say nothing, CloudFare Will show you a graph of their fail.
    - saurik 14y ago
      I take it you haven't seen the blog posts by Amazon? They are always very interesting, very detailed, and they write them even if the effects only hit some features of a single availability zone. I have written about Amazon's postmortems in the past, with detailed links to examples. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4705110 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4705110 They also, of course, don't write blog posts for every single incident (as I point out in that previous post), but they do acknowledge incidents on their status pages, and they don't seem to filter their postmortems based on "can I turn this into a PR event" as CloudFlare does; in the example situation I provided that CloudFlare carefully ignored, Amazon would have posted something, even though it only would not have let them come off sounding like heroes. CloudFlare simply should not be getting happy hacker credit for these exaggerated tales of valor... this is just marketing copy, not a postmortem, and it isn't even clear that we should be believing any of the statements they have made. I mean, can you even imagine an Amazon postmortem requiring a rebuttle by gizmodo, as we see for this CloudFlare article? http://gizmodo.com/5992652 http://gizmodo.com/5992652
Mahn 14y ago
I wouldn't really call it PR, it seems to me they just genuinely enjoy writing about this stuff.
- eastdakota 14y ago
  Yup. At first we didn't think anyone else would like our geeky ramblings. Always surprised the more technical detail we go into the more people are engaged.
  - rurounijones 14y ago
    More technical detail I think is always appreciated, it is a great learning experience reading those posts.
  - robryan 14y ago
    Yeah, a writeup where I can go do some research to understand is much better than one that glosses over the details with bad analogies and simplistic explanations.
- youngtaff 14y ago
  It's definitely PR, also look at who submitted it to HN That said it's pretty interesting if you ignore the bits that sound like hype.

setheron 14y ago

I still found it a bit too high level for me, but on the other the topic doesn't interest me much.

deleted 14y ago

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