Item — HN Reader

> Do I want to deal with what Cloudflare offers? I do not, I have higher value work to focus on. I want to pay someone else to deal with this, and just like when cloud providers are down, it'll be back up eventually.

This is specious reasoning. How come I had to endure a total outage due to the rollout of a mitigation of a Nextjs vulnerability when my organization doesn't even own any React app, let alone a Nextjs one?

Also specious reasoning #2, not wanting to maintain a service does not justify blindly rolling out config changes globally without any safeguards.

1 comments

If you are a customer of Cloudflare, and not happy, I encourage you to evaluate other providers more to your liking. Perhaps you'll find someone more fitting to your use case and operational preferences, but perhaps not. My day job org pays Cloudflare hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and am satisfied with how they operate. Everyone has choice, exercise it if you choose. I'm sure your account exec would be happy to take the feedback. Feedback, including yours, is valuable and important to attempt to improve the product and customer experience (imho; i of course do not speak for Cloudflare, only myself).

As a recovering devops/infra person from a lifetime ago (who has, much to my heartbreak, broken prod more than once), perhaps that is where my grace in this regard comes from. Systems and their components break, systems and processes are imperfect, and urgency can lead to unexpected failure. Sometimes its Cloudflare, other times it's Azure, GCP, Github, etc. You can always use something else, but most of us continue to pick the happy path of "it works most of the time, and sometimes it does not." Hopefully the post mortem has action items to improve the safeguards you mention. If there are no process and technical improvements from the outage, certainly, that is where the failure lies (imho).

China-nexus cyber threat groups rapidly exploit React2Shell vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182) - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/china-nexus-cyber-thre... - December 4th, 2025

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> you are a customer of Cloudflare, and not happy, I encourage you to evaluate other providers more to your liking.

I think your take is terribly simplistic. In a professional setting, virtually all engineers have no say on whether the company switches platforms or providers. Their responsibility is to maintain and develop services that support business. The call to switch a provider is ultimately a business and strategic call, and is a subject that has extremely high inertia. You hired people specialized in technologies, and now you're just dumping all that investment? Not to mention contracts. Think about the problem this creates.

Some of you sound like amateurs toying with pet projects, where today it's framework A on cloud provider X whereas tomorrow it's framework B on cloud provider Y. Come the next day, rinse and repeat. This is unthinkable in any remotely professional setting.

> Some of you sound like amateurs toying with pet projects, where today it's framework A on cloud provider X whereas tomorrow it's framework B on cloud provider Y. Come the next day, rinse and repeat. This is unthinkable in any remotely professional setting.

Vendor contracts have 1-3 year terms. We (a financial services firm) re-evaluate tech vendors every year for potential replacement and technologists have direct input into these processes. I understand others may operate under a different vendor strategy. As a vendor customer, your choices are to remain a customer or to leave and find another vendor. These are not feelings, these are facts. If you are unhappy but choose not to leave a vendor, that is a choice, but it is your choice to make, and unless you are a large enough customer that you have leverage over the vendor, these are your only options.