Re:Ask HN: What's the actual fallout been from the Cloudflar...
by tgragnato on Sunday March 05, 2017 @06:42PM
(#13799613)
Yeah it makes a targeted attack easier.
But it prevents attacks across different customers.
Tradeoffs ...
Maintaining a running pool of VMs per service in a sufficient number to serve the load of requests grouped by customer, and assigning the VM to a specific customer only at needs is different than running permanently a pool of (n).customers x (m).services VMs.
This is why an efficient scheduler and the usage of disposable VMs is a need. Still depending on the load and the variety of the traffic it may not be feasible, you are absolutely right !
Another approach to ensure isolation is the usage of a MAC framework. As I wrote "I bet they can develop even better solutions" ;)
Re:Ask HN: What's the actual fallout been from the Cloudflar...
by jacquesm on Sunday March 05, 2017 @11:09PM
(#13800641)
The point is that if they had isolated their customers only those customers using that particular feature would have been affected. Now potentially all customers have been affected.
The operational overhead of VM/Container isolation for the cartesian product of customer + service sounds like it'd be extremely prohibitive. It's certainly a tradeoff, but to claim it's saner is missing all of the other costs associated with such a system.