The deployment pattern from Cloudflare looks insane to me.

I've worked at one of the top fintech firms, whenever we do a config change or deployment, we are supposed to have rollback plan ready and monitor key dashboards for 15-30 minutes.

The dashboards need to be prepared beforehand on systems and key business metrics that would be affected by the deployment and reviewed by teammates.

I've never seen a downtime longer than 1 minute while I was there, because you get a spike on the dashboard immediately when something goes wrong.

For the entire system to be down for 10+ minutes due to a bad config change or deployment is just beyond me.

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vlovich123 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

That is also true at Cloudflare for what it’s worth. However, the company is so big that there’s so many different products all shipping at the same time it can be hard to correlate it to your release, especially since there’s a 5 min lag (if I recall correctly) in the monitoring dashboards to get all the telemetry from thousands of servers worldwide.

Comparing the difficulty of running the world’s internet traffic with hundreds of customer products with your fintech experience is like saying “I can lift 10 pounds. I don’t know why these guys are struggling to lift 500 pounds”.

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dehrmann an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Cloudflare is orders of magnitude larger than any fintech. Rollouts likely take much longer, and having a human monitoring a dashboard doesn't scale.

	▲	notepad0x90 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That means they engineered their systems incorrectly then? Precisely because they are much bigger, they should be more resilient. You know who's bigger than Cloudflare? tier-1 ISPs, if they had an outage the whole internet would know about it, and they do have outages except they don't cascade into a global mess like this. Just speculating based on my experience: It's more likely than not that they likely refused to invest in fail-safe architectures for cost reasons. Control-plane and data-plane should be separate, a react patch shouldn't affect traffic forwarding. Forget manual rollbacks, there should be automated reversion to a known working state.

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markus_zhang 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My guess is that CF has so many external customers that they need to move fast and try not to break things. My hunch is that their culture always favors moving fast. As long as they are not breaking too many things, customers won't leave them.

	▲	paradite 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There is nothing wrong with moving fast and deploying fast. I'm more talking about how slow it was to detect the issue caused by the config change, and perform the rollback of the config change. It took 20 minutes.

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theideaofcoffee 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same, my time at a F100 ecommerce retailer showed me the same. Every change control board justification needed an explicit back-out/restoration plan with exact steps to be taken, what was being monitored to ensure that was being held to, contacts of prominent groups anticipated to have an effect, emergency numbers/rooms for quick conferences if in fact something did happen.

The process was pretty tight, almost no revenue-affecting outages from what I can remember because it was such a collaborative effort (even though the board presentation seemed a bit spiky and confrontational at the time, everyone was working together).

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prdonahue 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And you moved at a glacial pace compared to Cloudflare. There are tradeoffs.

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theideaofcoffee an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes, of course, I want the organization that inserted itself into handling 20% of the world's internet traffic to move fast and break things. Like breaking the internet on a bi-weekly basis. Yep, great tradeoff there.

Give me a break.

	▲	jimmydorry 11 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		While you're taking your break, exploits gain traction in the wild and one of the value propositions for using a service provider like CloudFlare is catching and mitigating theses exploits as fast as possible. From the OP, this outage was in relation to handling a nasty RCE.
	▲	wvenable an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But if your job is mitigate attacks/issues then things can very broken while you're being slow to mitigate it.

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lljk_kennedy 33 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

This sounds just as bad as yolo-merges, just on the other end of the spectrum.

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draw_down 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]