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They failed on so many levels here. How can you write the proxy without handling the config containing more than the maximum features limit you set yourself?

by polack 10mo ago

They failed on so many levels here. How can you write the proxy without handling the config containing more than the maximum features limit you set yourself? How can the database export query not have a limit set if there is a hard limit on number of features? Why do they do non-critical changes in production before testing in a stage environment? Why did they think this was a cyberattack and only after two hours realize it was the config file? Why are they that afraid of a botnet? Does not leave me confident that they will handle the next Aisuru attack. I'm migrating my customers off Cloudflare. I don't think they can swallow the next botnet attacks and everyone on Cloudflare go down with the ship, so it will be safer to not be behind Cloudflare when it hits.

raxxorraxor 10mo ago
I don't think these are realistic requirements for any engineered system to be honest. Realistic is to have contingencies for such cases, which are simply errors. But the case for Cloudflare here is complicated. Every engineer is very free to make a better system though.
- polack 10mo ago
  What is not realistic? To do simple input validation on data that has the potential to break 20% of the internet? To not have a system in place to rollback to the latest known state when things crash? Cloudflare builds a global scale system, not an iphone app. Please act like it.
  - dspillett 10mo ago
    > To do simple input validation on data that has the potential to break 20% of the internet? There will always be bugs in code, even simple code, and sometimes those things don't get caught before they cause significant trouble. The failing here was not having a quick rollback option, or having it and not hitting the button soon enough (even if they thought the problem was probably something else, I think my paranoia about my own code quality is such that I would have been rolling back much sooner just in case I was wrong about the “something else”).
  - aquariusDue 10mo ago
    Yeah, I don't quite understand the people cutting Cloudflare massive slack. It's not about nailing blame on a single person or a team, it's about keeping a company that is THE closest thing to a public utility for the web accountable. They more or less did a Press Release with a call to action to buy or use their services at the end and everybody is going "Yep, that's totally fine. Who hasn't sent a bug to prod, amirite?". It goes over my head why Cloudflare is HN's darling while others like Google, Microsoft and AWS don't usually enjoy the same treatment.
    - miyuru 10mo ago
      >It goes over my head why Cloudflare is HN's darling while others like Google, Microsoft and AWS don't usually enjoy the same treatment. Do the others you mentioned provide such detailed outage reports, within 24 hours of an incident? I’ve never seen others share the actual code that related to the incident. Or the CEO or CTO replying to comments here? >Press Release This is not press release, they always did these outage posts from the start of the company. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=blog.cloudflare.com%20Cloudflare%20outage&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
      - aquariusDue 10mo ago
        > Do the others you mentioned provide such detailed outage reports, within 24 hours of an incident? I’ve never seen others share the actual code that related to the incident. Azure (albeit pretty old): https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devopsservice/?p=17665 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devopsservice/?p=17665 AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/ https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/ GCP: https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1SsW https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S... The code sample might as well be COBOL for people not familiar with Rust and its error handling semantics. > Or the CEO or CTO replying to comments here? I've looked around the thread and I haven't seen the CTO here nor the CEO, probably I'm not familiar with their usernames and that's on me. > This is not press release, they always did these outage posts from the start of the company. My mistake calling them press releases. Newspapers and online publications also skim this outage report to inform their news stories. I wasn't clear enough on my previous comment. I'd like all major players in the internet and web infrastructure to be held to higher standards. As it stands when it comes to them or the tech department of a retail store the retail store must answer to more laws when surface area of combined activities is took into account. Yes, Cloudflare excels where others don't or barely bother and I too enjoyed the pretty graphs, diagrams and I've learned some nifty Rust tricks. EDIT: I've removed some unwarranted snark from my comment which I apologize for.
  - raxxorraxor 10mo ago
    Cloudflares success was simplicity to build a distributed system in different data centers around the world to be implemented by third party IT workers while Cloudflare were a few people. There are probably a lot of shitty iPhone apps that do less important work and are vastly more complex than the former Cloudflare server node configuration. Every system has a non-reducible risk and no data rollback is trivial, especially for a CDN.
cowsandmilk 10mo ago
> Why do they do non-critical changes in production before testing in a stage environment? I guess the noncritical change here was the change to the database? My experience has been a lot of teams do a poor job having a faithful replica of databases in stage environments to expose this type of issue.
- brookst 10mo ago
  In part because it is somewhere between really hard and impossible. Is your staging DB going to be as big? Seeing the same RPS as prod? Seeing the same scenarios? Permissions stuff might be caught without a completely faithful replica, but there are always going to be attributes of the system that only exist in prod.
jve 10mo ago
> I'm migrating my customers off Cloudflare. 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.
- Carriethebest 10mo ago
  There are many self-hosted alternatives to protect against botnet. We don't have to use cloudflare. Everthing is under their control!
  - sofixa 10mo ago
    > There are many self-hosted alternatives to protect against botnet Whatever you do, unless you have their bandwidth capacity, at some point those "self-hosted" will get flooded with traffic.
    - benjiro 10mo ago
      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. I am getting old lol ...
      - throw0101c 10mo ago
        > As yourself more the question, is your service that important to need 99.999% uptime? What is the cost of many-9s uptime from Cloudflare? For DDoS protection it is $0/month on their free tier: * https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/plans/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/plans/
vsl 10mo ago
> Why did they think this was a cyberattack and only after two hours realize it was the config file? They explain that at some length in TFA.
huijzer 10mo ago
> They failed on so many levels here. That's often the case with human error as especially aviation safety experts know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
- itzjacki 10mo ago
  Exactly. The only way this could happen in the first place was _because_ they failed at so many levels. And as a result, more layers of Swiss cheese will be added, and holes in existing ones will be patched. This process is the reason flying is so safe, and the reason why Cloudflare will be a little bit more resilient tomorrow than it was yesterday.
- miki123211 10mo ago
  In organizations with this level of care, if you fail at fewer levels, customers just never notice the error. Any big and noticeable incident is one of the "we failed on so many levels here" kind, by definition.
michaelt 10mo ago
> Why did they think this was a cyberattack Isn’t getting cyberattacked their core business?
- Yokohiii 10mo ago
  If so, why is their discovery of, non ambiguous?
kosolam 10mo ago
So where are you migrating to?
nip 10mo ago
It’s easy to pick on logic that failed and for which you have a very detailed and great post mortem write-up. Yet you omit to acknowledge that the remaining 99.99999% logic written that powers Cloudflare works flawlessly. Also, hindsight is 20/20
- Yokohiii 10mo ago
  You are less critical with CF then they are with themselves. A system that is 99.99999% flawless, can still be unusable. optimism bias: 100/100
aforwardslash 10mo ago
I know its easy to criticize what happened after the fact and having a clear(er) picture of all the moving parts and the timeline of events, but I think that while most of the people in the thread are pointing out either Rust-related or lack of configuration validation, what really grinds my gears is something that - in my opinion - is bad engineering. Having an unprivileged application querying system.columns to infer the table layout is just bad; Not having a proper, well-defined table structure indicates sloppiness in the overall schema design, specially if it changes quickly. Considering specifically clickhouse, and even if this approach would be a good idea, the unprivileged way of doing it would be "DESCRIBE TABLE <name>", NOT iterating system.columns. The gist of it - sloppy design not even well implemented. Having a critical application issuing ad-hoc commands to system.* tablespace instead of using a well-tested library is just amateurism, and again - bad engineering; IMO it is good practice to consider all system.* privileged applications and ensure their querying is completely separate from your application logic; Sometimes some system tables change, and fields are added and/or removed - not planning for this will basically make future compatibility a nightmare. Not only the problematic query itself, but the whole context of this screams "lack of proper application design" and devs not knowing how to use the product and/or read the documentation. Granted, this is a bit "close to home" for me, because I use ClickHouse extensively (at a scale - I'm assuming - several orders of magnitude smaller than CloudFlare) and I have spent a lot of time designing specifically to avoid at least some of these kind of mistakes. But, if I can do it at my scale, why aren't they doing it?
- Yokohiii 10mo ago
  On all the other issues, I thought they wanted to do the right thing at heart, but missed to make it fail safe. I can pass it as a problem of a journey to maturity or simply the fact that you can't get everything perfect. Maybe even a bit of sloppiness here and there. The database issue screamed at me: lack of expertise. I don't use CH, but seeing someone to mess with a production system and they being surprised "Oh, it does that?", is really bad. And this is obviously not knowledge that is hard to achieve, buried deep in a manual or an edge case only discoverable by source code, it's bread and butter knowledge you should know. What is confusing, that they didn't add this to their follow-up steps. With some benefit of doubt I'd assume they didn't want to put something very basic as a reason out there, just to protect the people behind it from widespread blame. But if that's not the case, then it's a general problem. Sadly it's not uncommon that components like databases are dealt with, on an low effort basis. Just a thing we plug in and works. But it's obviously not.
tete 10mo ago
I agree. I think the comments about how "it is fine, because so many things had to fail" do not apply in this case. It's not that many things had to fail, it's that many things that are obvious haven't been done. It would be a valid excuse if many "exotic" scenarios would have to align, not when it's obvious error cases that weren't handled and changes have not been tested. While having wrong first assumptions is just how things work when you try to analyze the issue[1], not testing changes before production is just stupidity and nothing else. The story would be different if eg. multiple unlikely, hard to track things happened at once without anyone making a clearly linkable event, something that would also happen in staging. Most of the things mentioned could essentially statically checked. This is the prime example of what you want as any tech person, because it's not hard to prevent compared to a lot of scenarios where you deal with balancing likelihoods of scenarios, timings, etc. You don't think someone is a great plumber, because they forgot their tools and missed that big hole in the pipe and also rang at the wrong door, because all these things failed. You think someone is a good plumber if they said they would have to go back to fetch a bulky specialized tool, because this is the rare case in which they need it, but they could also do this other thing in this spcific case. They are great plumbers if they tell you how this happened in first place and how to fix it. They are great plumbers if they manage to fix something outside of their usual scope. Here pretty much all of the things that you pay them for failed. At a large scale. I am sure this has there are reasons which we don't now about, and I hope that CloudFlare can fix them. Be it management focusing on the wrong things, be it developers not being in the wrong position or annoyed enough to care or something else entirely. However, not doing these things is (likely) a sign that currently they are not in the state of creating reliable systems - at least none reliable enough for what they are doing. It would be perfectly fine if they ran a web shop or something, but if as experienced many other companies rely on you being up or their stuff fails, then maybe you should not run a company with products like "Always Online". [1] And should make you adapt the process of analyzing issues. Eg. making sure config changes are "very loud" in monitoring. It's one of the most easily tracked thing that can go wrong, and can relatively easily be mapped to a point in time compared to many other things.

polack 10mo ago

Yes, it's probably an overreaction. 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.

dspillett 10mo ago
> • 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.