DNSSEC Outage on www.cloudflare.com – 2019-03-21

Re:DNSSEC Outage on www.cloudflare.com – 2019-03-21 by close04 on Saturday April 13, 2019 @07:46AM (#19652413)

Natural evolution. Because it follows vastly different rules. I still fail to see any example given for how one “cascade failure” takes down all the routers in an infrastructure like Cloudflare’s. I can think of a dozen ways a non-homogeneous system can fail (like incompatible updates and config, confusions between the types of components, etc.). In the end you usually end up with massive expenditure that introduces just as many problems as it solves.

You may be onto something that nobody else spotted but so far the arguments are too generic (“failure”) or incompatible with the premise (rules of natural evolution applied to very artificial systems).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to learn something new and understand a different point of view but so far the arguments don’t help me.

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Re:DNSSEC Outage on www.cloudflare.com – 2019-03-21 by zzzcpan on Saturday April 13, 2019 @08:18AM (#19652562)

I actually used that example because they had this exact problem in the past, here's the link: https://blog.cloudflare.com/todays-outage-post-mortem-82515/

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Re:DNSSEC Outage on www.cloudflare.com – 2019-03-21 by peterwwillis on Sunday April 14, 2019 @12:12AM (#19657570)

And Google had a similar issue recently where they didn't test their firmware upgrade auto rollback, so a boned firmware upgrade bricked a region until they could manually recover it. If they had rolled out to all regions at once, and all the devices were the same, it would have been chaos.

Often the only thing preventing mass upgrades from becoming mass outages is some part of the network just happens to work differently.

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Re:DNSSEC Outage on www.cloudflare.com – 2019-03-21 by close04 on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @12:07PM (#19674853)

Well... sure. Just as long as you keep in mind that a "not really tested [something]" will very easily get replicated on multiple vendor devices. It's not like they did it because they hate Vendor1 but will make sure to test all the corner cases with Vendor2. Some scenarios will by design ensure you can't have all of them fail because they are not susceptible to the same failure modes. But to compensate you introduce additional failure modes (especially human error) by using a heterogeneous environment. Not to mention the expense.

I was actually hoping for an interesting human independent failure. A cosmic radiation caused bit flip that would occur on a particular device. :) Human error can overcome any setup.

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