The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.
The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.
So I work in the IT department of a pretty large company. One of the things that we do on a regular basis is staged updates, so we’ll get a small number of computers and we’ll update the software on them to the latest version or whatever. Then we leave it for about a week, and if the world doesn’t end we update the software onto the next group and then the next and then the next until everything is upgraded. We don’t just slap it onto production infrastructure and then go to the pub.
But apparently our standards are slightly higher than that of an international organisation who’s whole purpose is cyber security.
Their motivation is that that file has to change rapidly to respond to threats. If a new botnet pops up and starts generating a lot of malicious traffic, they can’t just let it run for a week
How about an hour? 10 minutes? Would have prevented this. I very much doubt that their service is so unstable and flimsy that they need to respond to stuff on such short notice. It would be worthless to their customers if that were true.
Restarting and running some automated tests on a server should not take more than 5 minutes.
My assumption is that the pattern you describe is possible/doable on certain scales and in certain combinations of technologies. But doing this across a distributed system with as many nodes and as many different nodes as CloudFlare has, and still have a system that can be updated quickly (responding to DDOS attacks for example) is a lot harder.
If you really feel like you have a better solution please contact them and consult for them, the internet would thank you for it.