Name me global, redundant systems that have not (yet) failed.
And if you used cloudflare to protect against botnet and now go off cloudflare... you are vulnerable and may experience more downtime if you cannot swallow the traffic.
I mean no service have 100% uptime - just that some have more nines than others.
As yourself more the question, is your service that important to need 99.999% uptime? Because i get the impression that people are so fixated on this uptime concept, that the idea of being down for a few hours is the most horrible issue in the world. To the point that they rather hand over control of their own system to a 3th party, then accept a downtime.
The fact that cloudflare can literally ready every bit of communication (as it sits between the client and your server) is already plenty bad. And yet, we accept this more easily, then a bit of downtime. We shall not ask about the prices for that service ;)
To me its nothing more then the whole "everybody on the cloud" issue, when most do not need the resource that cloud companies like AWS provide (and the bill), and yet, get totally tied down to this one service.
Not when you start pushing into the TB's range of monthly data... When you get that dreaded phone call from a CF rep, because the bill that is coming is no joke.
Its free as long as you really are small, not worth milking. The moment you can afford to run your own mini dc at your office, you start to enter the "well, hello there" for CF.
> The moment you can afford to run your own mini dc at your office, you start to enter the "well, hello there" for CF.
As someone who has (and is) runs (running) a DC with all the electrical/UPS, cooling, piping, HVAC+D stuff to deal with: it can be a lot of just time/overhead.
Especially if you don't have a number of folks in-house to deal with all that 'non-IT' equipment (I'm a bit strange in that I have an interest in both IT and HVAC-y stuff).
> There are many self-hosted alternatives to protect against botnet.
What would some good examples of those be? I think something like Anubis is mostly against bot scraping, not sure how you'd mitigate a DDoS attack well with self-hosted infra if you don't have a lot of resources?
On that note, what would be a good self-hosted WAF? I recall using mod_security with Apache and the OWASP ruleset, apparently the Nginx version worked a bit slower (e.g. https://www.litespeedtech.com/benchmarks/modsecurity-apache-... ), there was also the Coraza project but I haven't heard much about it https://coraza.io/ or maybe the people who say that running a WAF isn't strictly necessary also have a point (depending on the particular attack surface).
There is haproxy-protection, which I believe is the basis of Kiwiflare. Clients making new connections have to solve a proof-of-work challenge that take about 3 seconds of compute time.
Well if you self host DDoS protection service, that would be VERY expensive. You would need rent rack space along with a very fast internet connection at multiple data centers to host this service.
If you're buying transit, you'll have a hard time getting away with less than 10% commit, i.e. you'll have to pay for 10 Gbps of transit to have a 100 Gbps port, which will typically run into 4 digits USD / month. You'll need a few hundred Gbps of network and scrubbing capacity to handle common DDoS attacks using amplification from script kids with a 10 Gbps uplink server that allow spoofing, and probably on the order of 50+ Tbps to handle Aisuru.
If you're just renting servers instead, you have a few options that are effectively closer to a 1% commit, but better have a plan B for when your upstreams drop you if the incoming attack traffic starts disrupting other customers - see Neoprotect having to shut down their service last month.
We had better uptime with AWS WAF in us-east-1 than we've had in the last 1.5 years of Cloudflare.
I do like the flat cost of Cloudflare and feature set better but they have quite a few outages compared to other large vendors--especially with Access (their zero trust product)
I'd lump them into GitHub levels of reliability
We had a comparable but slightly higher quote from an Akamai VAR.
But at the same time, what value do they add if they:
* Took down the the customers sites due to their bug.
* Never protected against an attack that our infra could not have handled by itself.
* Don't think that they will be able to handle the "next big ddos" attack.
It's just an extra layer of complexity for us. I'm sure there are attacks that could help our customers with, that's why we're using them in the first place. But until the customers are hit with multiple ddos attacks that we can not handle ourself then it's just not worth it.
> • Took down the the customers sites due to their bug.
That is always a risk with using a 3rd party service, or even adding extra locally managed moving parts. We use them in DayJob, and despite this huge issue and the number of much smaller ones we've experienced over the last few years their reliability has been pretty darn good (at least as good as the Azure infrastructure we have their services sat in front of).
> • Never protected against an attack that our infra could not have handled by itself.
But what about the next one… Obviously this is a question sensitive to many factors in our risk profiles and attitudes to that risk, there is no one right answer to the “but is it worth it?” question here.
On a slightly facetious point: if something malicious does happen to your infrastructure, that it does not cope well with, you won't have the “everyone else is down too” shield :) [only slightly facetious because while some of our clients are asking for a full report including justification for continued use of CF and any other 3rd parties, which is their right both morally and as written in our contracts, most, especially those who had locally managed services affected, have taken the “yeah, half our other stuff was affected to, what can you do?” viewpoint].
> • Don't think that they will be able to handle the "next big ddos" attack.
It is a war of attrition. At some point a new technique, or just a new botnet significantly larger than those seen before, will come along that they might not be able to deflect quickly. I'd be concerned if they were conceited enough not to be concerned about that possibility. Any new player is likely to practise on smaller targets first before directly attacking CF (in fact I assume that it is rather rare that CF is attacked directly) or a large enough segment of their clients to cause them specific issues. Could your infrastructure do any better if you happen to be chosen as one of those earlier targets?
Again, I don't know your risk profile so can say which is the right answer, if there even is an easy one other than “not thinking about it at all” being a truly wrong answer. Also DDoS protection is not the only service many use CF for, so those need to be considered too if you aren't using them for that one thing.
Is that an overreaction?
Name me global, redundant systems that have not (yet) failed.
And if you used cloudflare to protect against botnet and now go off cloudflare... you are vulnerable and may experience more downtime if you cannot swallow the traffic.
I mean no service have 100% uptime - just that some have more nines than others.