cloud services

widespread-cloudflare-outage-blamed-on-mysterious-traffic-spike

Widespread Cloudflare outage blamed on mysterious traffic spike

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About 20 percent of the web relies on Cloudflare to manage and protect traffic, a Cloudflare blog noted in July. Some intermediate fixes have been made, Cloudflare’s status page said. But as of this writing, many sites remain down. According to DownDetector, Amazon, Spotify, Zoom, Uber, and Azure also experienced outages.

“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” Cloudflare’s spokesperson said. “We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”

Cloudflare will continue to update the status page as fixes come in, and a blog will be posted later today discussing the issue, the spokesperson told Ars.

It’s the latest massive outage site owners have coped with after an Amazon Web Services outage took out half the web last month. Both the AWS outage and the chaotic CrowdStrike outage last year were estimated to cost affected parties billions.

Critics have suggested that outages like these make it clear how fragile the Internet really is, especially when everyone relies on the same service providers. During the AWS outage, some sites considered diversifying service providers to avoid losing business during future outages.

The outage may have caused some investors to panic, as Cloudflare’s stock fell about 3 percent amid the widespread outage.

Ars will update this story when Cloudflare provides more information on the outage.

This story was updated on November 18 to add new information from Cloudflare.

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Google accused of shadow campaigns redirecting antitrust scrutiny to Microsoft

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On Monday, Microsoft came out guns blazing, posting a blog accusing Google of “dishonestly” funding groups conducting allegedly biased studies to discredit Microsoft and mislead antitrust enforcers and the public.

In the blog, Microsoft lawyer Rima Alaily alleged that an astroturf group called the Open Cloud Coalition will launch this week and will appear to be led by “a handful of European cloud providers.” In actuality, however, those smaller companies were secretly recruited by Google, which allegedly pays them “to serve as the public face” and “obfuscate” Google’s involvement, Microsoft’s blog said. In return, Google likely offered the cloud providers cash or discounts to join, Alaily alleged.

The Open Cloud Coalition is just one part of a “pattern of shadowy campaigns” that Google has funded, both “directly and indirectly,” to muddy the antitrust waters, Alaily alleged. The only other named example that Alaily gives while documenting this supposed pattern is the US-based Coalition for Fair Software Licensing (CFSL), which Alaily said has attacked Microsoft’s cloud computing business in the US, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

That group is led by Ryan Triplette, who Alaily said is “a well-known lobbyist for Google in Washington, DC, but Google’s affiliation isn’t disclosed publicly by the organization.” An online search confirms Triplette was formerly a lobbyist for Franklin Square Group, which Politico reported represented Google during her time there.

Ars could not immediately reach the CFSL for comment. Google’s spokesperson told Ars that the company has “been a public supporter of CFSL for more than two years” and has “no idea what evidence Microsoft cites that we are the main funder of CFSL.” If Triplette was previously a lobbyist for Google, the spokesperson said, “that’s a weird criticism to make” since it’s likely “everybody in law, policy, etc.,” has “worked for Google, Microsoft, or Amazon at some point, in some capacity.”

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Redis’ license change and forking are a mess that everybody can feel bad about

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Licensing is hard —

Cloud firms want a version of Redis that’s still open to managed service resale.

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AWS data centers built right next to suburban cul-de-sac housing

Enlarge / An Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center under construction in Stone Ridge, Virginia, in March 2024. Amazon will spend more than $150 billion on data centers in the next 15 years.

Getty Images

Redis, a tremendously popular tool for storing data in-memory rather than in a database, recently switched its licensing from an open source BSD license to both a Source Available License and a Server Side Public License (SSPL).

The software project and company supporting it were fairly clear in why they did this. Redis CEO Rowan Trollope wrote on March 20 that while Redis and volunteers sponsored the bulk of the project’s code development, “the majority of Redis’ commercial sales are channeled through the largest cloud service providers, who commoditize Redis’ investments and its open source community.” Clarifying a bit, “cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge.”

Clarifying even further: Amazon Web Services (and lesser cloud giants), you cannot continue reselling Redis as a service as part of your $90 billion business without some kind of licensed contribution back.

This generated a lot of discussion, blowback, and action. The biggest thing was a fork of the Redis project, Valkey, that is backed by The Linux Foundation and, critically, also Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. Valkey is “fully open source,” Linux Foundation execs note, with the kind of BSD-3-Clause license Redis sported until recently. You might note the exception of Microsoft from that list of fork fans.

As noted by Matt Asay, who formerly ran open source strategy and marketing at AWS, most developers are “largely immune to Redis’ license change.” Asay suggests that, aside from the individual contributions of AWS engineer and former Redis core contributor Madelyn Olson (who contributed in her free time) and Alibaba’s Zhao Zhao, “The companies jumping behind the fork of Redis have done almost nothing to get Redis to its current state.”

Olson told TechCrunch that she was disappointed by Redis’ license change but not surprised. “I’m more just disappointed than anything else.” David Nally, AWS’ current director for open source strategy and marketing, demurred when asked by TechCrunch if AWS considered buying a Redis license from Redis Inc. before forking. “[F]rom an open-source perspective, we’re now invested in ensuring the success of Valkey,” Nally said.

Shifts in open source licensing have triggered previous keep-it-open forks, including OpenSearch (from ElasticSearch) and OpenTofu (from Terraform). With the backing of the Linux Foundation and some core contributors, though, Valkey will likely soon evolve far beyond a drop-in Redis replacement, and Redis is likely to follow suit.

If you’re reading all this and you don’t own a gigascale cloud provider or sit on the board of a source code licensing foundation, it’s hard to know what to make of the fiasco. Every party in this situation is doing what is legally permissible, and software from both sides will continue to be available to the wider public. Taking your ball and heading home is a longstanding tradition when parties disagree on software goals and priorities. But it feels like there had to be another way this could have worked out.

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