[ themattreid ]

There have been many articles about the downtime issue with Cloudflare last week, so I won’t get into the technical details of that. However, there’s the fine print to remember. Consider this a subtle reminder that core Internet infrastructure services like Cloudflare’s DNS-based “Always Online” caching and packet inspection security services do not come with Service Level Agreements even at the “Pro” account level. Even with a Pro account you are paying for a service with no uptime guarantee and you must only hope that it resolves your sites the majority of the time. This is fine, this is what the contract says: no SLA unless you pay for the Business account. An odd naming convention given that most Professionals are using their websites for business and would want the SLA, but I digress.

So, the SLA is not really the issue if you look at the architectural alternatives to building an architecture that desires availability when your primary and secondary DNS servers potentially going offline. The typical design involves using more than one and certainly more than two DNS servers for your domain so that your domain addresses will still resolve if the primary and even the second go offline. Typically these servers will be on separate subnets and even in separate geographical regions so that events like tsunamis and dataceneter fires do not take out both your primary and secondary name servers; so there are options for a third and fourth resolver; but not with Cloudflare.

Cloudflare limits the user to only using their DNS servers for your domain – of which they only provide two resolvers, not three or four like most DNS services. So if you wish to have a third or fourth name server entry to ensure that even if the primary and secondary Cloudflare DNS servers go offline, well sorry, you cannot do so. Cloudflare will disable your domain in their system if you use any DNS entries that are not their own – which includes a third or forth setting. So now you have your “Professional” websites using a DNS and security service that has no SLA but which you are paying for “Professional” level services. If your “Professional” grade sites go offline because Cloudflare botched the router upgrade or was hacked, you’re SOL and you do not get downtime credits, sorry. You can’t even design your architecture to resolve with alternate name servers or they will disable your domain. So if Cloudflare ever goes offline your sites will go offline with them and there are no alternatives. If you use Cloudflare then their service becomes your Single Point of Failure.

I am not one to create drama but this is an issue that none of the other users of Cloudflare “Pro” account users that I’ve talked to were aware of. So, here is a recent email exchange with Cloudflare regarding a credit for having caused all of my sites to be offline on more than one occasion — this is not limited to the recent event with their routers.

Cloudflare: “I’ve reviewed your account and note that you currently have 3 Pro subscriptions with us. At this time we do not offer a guaranteed level of service or SLA for our Free or Pro plans… We are also investing a great deal of time and resources to ensure the resiliency of the network even in the event of localized failures that may happen from time to time.” — So not only is there no SLA but there could be localized failures from time to time that you also do not get credit for; that explains the monitoring failures for some of my sites that are in the same rack and some even running on the same servers but only the Cloudflare enabled domains are shown as being offline at the same time as the others being available.

My response to Cloudflare. “I will not keep Cloudflare running for my sites. There are many reasons but another one has recently made itself know to me when I decided to add tertiary and quaternary DNS servers, yet I run into the following technical limitation that precludes my ability to rely on Cloudflare for my back-end infrastructure domain: if I want to specify a 3rd or 4th DNS server as a backup resolver (like Route53 or my own servers running PowerDNS for example) then the Cloudflare system complains and disables my domain. I understand why the system is designed this way — you want all traffic going through the CF system so that the features are executed and so forth. However, in the event that an issue occurs like the previous outage then there is no fall back for users/systems to resolve my domain via an alternate DNS system. I am limited to two Cloudflare DNS servers and nothing more.

The way that the DNS requirement is setup makes Cloudflare an all or nothing solution – you either use Cloudflare for the domain or you do not. And, as 785,000+ sites experienced, this makes Cloudflare (no matter how resilient and improved after this incident) a single point of failure that system engineers and architects cannot design failover services around.

This is the second time that I have had issues with Cloudflare services not working correctly. The first was when one of my servers went offline and the “Always On” feature didn’t do anything, the site was not kept online via cache even though there had been plenty of time for the crawlers to get the content (which is static unchanging, non dynamic, non-database driven = simply a front page that is supposed to load fast and act as a click portal to our primary systems).

And now I have been seeing users connect to my site from countries that I have setup in the block list. I have a number of ‘trouble’ countries configured in Cloudflare to disallow access to my site yet these users are connecting anyway. Clearly the country blocking feature is broken as well.

I want to use Cloudflare. I want to love it. I want to tell everyone I know how great and useful it it. But after six months of using it on several sites it has done nothing more than cause me a lot of time trying out different configurations and wondering why feature x/y/z isn’t working as stated. Then there have been the outages from human error and incorrect ITIL process adherence.

So I will be setting up some alternate caching servers at different datacenters and moving some of my content onto a CDN. Cloudflare has failed and I am tired of wanting to like it.”