Alanis Morissette agrees that this is ironic.
don't you think?
It's bullshit all the way down.
Are there any companies left offering free DNS usable from Terraform that aren't part of the "Internet Five Eyes"?
edit: looks like Linode may be the next best 'not terrible' option
$ dig +short ns1.digitalocean.com aaaa
2400:cb00:2049:1::adf5:3a33
$ dig +short ns1.linode.com aaaa
2400:cb00:2049:1::a29f:1a63Also, SRE here but not for Cloudflare -- I've never seen SREs directly involved in externally published SLAs, they usually come from legal. We deal with SLOs on more fine grained SLIs than overall uptime
I made it to SLA (which I believe stands for service level agreement). What do the other abbreviations stand for?
SLO - Service Level Objective - the service level you strive for. If it's higher you have room for experimentation, etc.
SLI - Service Level Indicator - the actual metric(s) you use to measure a service level (latency, error rate, throughput, etc.)
SLO - service level objective, the stated availability (or latency or durability etc) of the service. Usually expressed as a value over a period of time (e.g 99.9% availability as measured over a moving 30 average). The SLO is measured by the SLI.
SLI - service level indicator. Simply, the direct measurement of the service (i.e metrics)
SRE - Site Reliability Engineer, usually a member of a team who is responsible for the continued availability of the service and the poor sap who gets paged when it breaches SLO or has an outage or other impactful event.
SLI: Service level indicator (Metric to measure the health of a service. For example successful requests per interval / total requests per interval.)
SLO: Service level objective (what performance you expect eg. the previously mentioned SLI is >= 99.5%)
SLA: Servicelevel agreement (legal agreement that defines what happens if a SLO is not met)
They are not being honest with themselves here
They aren't saying they guarantee 100% uptime. They're saying they'll pay you for any downtime. It's literally the 3rd paragraph:
> 1.2 Penalties. If the Service fails to meet the above service level, the Customer will receive a credit equal to the result of the Service Credit calculation in Section 6 of this SLA.
(Most people I know consider them meaningless marketing BS that's really just meant to trick people or satisfy some make-work checkbox)
> Cloudflare ("Company") commits to provide a level of service for Business Customers demonstrating: [...] 100% Uptime. The Service will serve Customer Content 100% of the time without qualification.
This is a legal commitment to provide 100% uptime. They are guaranteeing 100% uptime and defining penalties for failing to meet that guarantee. The fact that a penalty is defined does not stop it from being a guarantee.
"Service Credits are Customer’s sole and exclusive remedy for any violation of this SLA."
I don't think you know what a guarantee is.
For example when you buy a new car you get a guarantee that it won't break down. Are they claiming it won't break down? No, of course not. What a guarantee means is that they'll fix it or compensate you if it does.
Their phone line kept cutting us off and then the people there were not too helpful.
It's common to see CF being the DNS/CDN for applications across AWS, GCP, Azure etc. So perhaps CF being down affects more applications than individual cloud platforms?
It's not infrastructure anymore, As there is a new PaaS startup every week offering distributed hosting and So why bundling in DNS, DDOS detection+mitigation, cloud workers... with it is so hard?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale
As Cloudflare gets bigger, they can provide services more cheaply. This is because (a) they can more fully utilise their data centres and other physical capital investments, (b) they can divide their fixed software costs over more users and (c) they get process efficiencies and discounts with scale.
A new entrant will struggle to match cost unless they're able to obtain similar scale. The bigger Cloudflare gets, the bigger the scale that a new entrant needs to hit before they can match them on cost.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Second they're aiming to build a network effect through having huge number of locations. The more locations, the more appealing to new customers as they can be close to more users. A competitor will have to build a similar number of locations to match Cloudflare's proposition.
A new entrant cannot provide as much value, and therefore cannot charge as high a price, without building a similar sized network. This again requires the entrant to invest heavily before they can charge a similar price.
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The combination of these two things mean that when Cloudflare is operating at a large scale with a large network it can offer a more valuable service (and charge a higher price) than a new entrant, and earn more profit because it can operate at a lower cost.
Also, Cloudflare has the option of lowering its price and still being profitable due to lower costs at its scale, so it can deter entrants from trying to compete by the threat of being able to lower prices below what is profitable for new entrants.
The only players who can compete may be those who already have comparable size - Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, CDNs, etc, since they will already have addressed the issues of scale and network effects. However, they may not want to cannibalise their existing markets. It will be hard for other new entrants to compete.
Others at best offer a limited trial plan, But most are just 'Speak to expert/ Contact us' for pricing which means haggling with a sales rep while we can just build things. Even the paid plans of CF is reasonable when compared with others with better features.
You can't build a Cloudflare competitor in AWS/Azure/Linode/DO/etc. You need your own data centers. Multiple of them across the country, ideally around the world if you want to serve the whole world.
This is insanely hard.
And I'm saying this for the last time: no one type google into google!
The Cloudflare Dashboard is also no longer fully loading.
Sites are gradually reappearing as I type this. Some of my sites, and doordash.com, were returning 500 errors again just a minute ago. They just came back up, followed by the CF dashboard loading again.
Should be back up everywhere.