Migration of Dreamwidth off of Cloudflare

[mark]

Good $time_of_day!

If you're just joining us and are not sure why we're moving off of Cloudflare, please see denise's previous post. I know that as of today, Cloudflare has decided to suspend service to the site in question, but we have decided to continue with our plan here and end our relationship with them.

I'm going to give a technical update here. Comments are screened, mostly because I won't be around to manage them overnight, but we'll look and unscreen things tomorrow.

As of a few minutes ago, we have completed the bulk of the migration. We are no longer proxying any user content through Cloudflare for the main Dreamwidth service. I.e., if you're reading this, your browser requests are no longer going through Cloudflare anymore.

The remaining work to be done before we're no longer customers of Cloudflare:

• Move our domain names and DNS serving. This is going to take a week or two, as DNS changes are not super fast and they're very important to get right.
• Move development services (the DW Hack domain names and such.)
• Cancel and close our account. (Will be done as soon as the above two are done.)

Additionally, there is going to be some ongoing work to tune the system. The reasons we had moved to Cloudflare in the first place were because, frankly, they do provide a technically excellent solution for deflecting automated traffic (bots and things), a robust cache, and they helped us save a good bit of money.

We are likely going to see some intermittent issues while we work to achieve some amount of parity back on the older system. I apologize in advance, and we'll use our dreamwidth account to keep you posted when there are issues, so please check that out.

Anyway, feel free to drop any questions in the comments and I'll get to them in the morning. Thanks again for your patience while we move things around.

Comments

[feistro]

Even with the site in question being off Cloudflare's service, the fact remains that Cloudflare's CEO is still trash who was willing let that kind of behavior slide for the most part. Better that you guys were able to part ways now rather than later.

Thanks for always looking out for the community, and for all the hard work you do to keep this place running. ♥ You guys are absolute superstars.

[bastun]

+1

(Still want my +1 or 'like' button!)

[sara]

Let us know if the money's a problem.

[mark]

We'll definitely be doing some math and let everybody know if we need to. That said, I'm sure there's optimization we can do if needed!

[claudeb]

As I just commented elsewhere, CF's new blog post sounds like, "We believe in free speech, except oops, some people use 'free speech' as a dogwhistle for inciting violence, and that creates legal liability when we're the ones enabling it."

"Also, people now hate us, and that means lost business. Double oops!"

We'll manage somehow, together, without them.

[jecook]

Indeed- the tone I got from reading both the blog post and their "abuse policies and approach" post was a bit two-faced, particularly this nugget:

"We do, however, believe that in cases where our values are diametrically opposed to a paying customer that we should take further steps to not only not profit from the customer, but to use any proceeds to further our companies’ values and oppose theirs.

For instance, when a site that opposed LGBTQ+ rights signed up for a paid version of DDoS mitigation service we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our services to them. We don't and won't talk about these efforts publicly because we don't do them for marketing purposes; we do them because they are aligned with what we believe is morally correct."

I fully understand that they are a business and that they need to make money; however, no one is forcing them to take on additional customers of questionable morals. And while taking the anti LGBTQ+ site's money and giving it to an organization that supports LGBTQ+ rights as a donation may seen like they are justifying performing the business transaction, it's two-faced and they should have never taken the business to begin with; that would have been the morally correct thing to do, IMAO. The whole thing has a repulsive oder to it.

[rydra_wong]

As of a few minutes ago, we have completed the bulk of the migration. We are no longer proxying any user content through Cloudflare for the main Dreamwidth service. I.e., if you're reading this, your browser requests are no longer going through Cloudflare anymore.

Congrats! \o/

[sexytronians]

Just brought myself another 6 months paid membership. Dreamwidth is a great website.

I’m glad to see a firm stance on using the service of companies that have to be dragged kicking and screaming to suspend their services to websites that commit acts of violence and hate.

[cmcmck]

Thanks for the update!

[pushkin666]

Thank you so much. I have been watching this explode overnight on SM and as somebody who 100% supports LGBTQ+ rights I am glad you are doing this.

[commoncomitatus]

Thanks for all your hard work, and your transparency through all of this! Hope everything goes as smoothly as can be expected. <3

[sabotabby]

You must be the world's only ethical social media platform. At least, it's really rare, and I'm impressed.

[shirebound]

Thank you for such wonderful and clear communication.

[ex_flameandsong751]

Thank y'all for working so hard to keep this site running and for having a conscience; I feel good about financially supporting Dreamwidth with points.

[rialian]

===Definitely no problem paying a bit more, if it comes to that. Thank you for doing the right thing, and providing an excellent service.

[wozwald]

what is the 'DW hack'? i haven't heard that term before

also thank you so much for this

[mark]

Oh, sorry about that!

In this case, the word 'hack' is being used in the original sense of the word -- in the spirit of building things. The 'DW hack' is where our developers build and test Dreamwidth, before we make changes to the real online service.

So, it's a place for our developers to work and try things out, to try to ensure that we don't ship broken software to all of the users!

[torylltales]

Thank you for being proactive on this issue, I fully support your decision.

[paserbyp]

Thank you for update!

[the_shoshanna]

I'm really glad you kept to your plan -- everything I've seen of CF's statement has big we'll-bring-them-back-as-soon-as-you-stop-looking-at-us vibes. They haven't disavowed a single thing that made you want to dump them in the first place.

[runpunkrun]

Yesterday on Twitter you said there'd be userpic weirdness, and I know this isn't your problem, but I'm still using Semagic, and it doesn't seem able to access my userpics anymore because they're showing up as broken images in the program. I can still post to DW using Semagic, and I can see my LJ icons in Semagic if I switch over to my LJ profile.

Do you think this is related to the migration?

[harpers_child]

I had a few hours yesterday where no one's userpics showed up in my feed or on my personal journal. I chalked it up to moving. Just dropping in my two cents in case it's symptomatic of a larger issue.

[keshwyn]

FWIW, Bitdefender had a bit of a snit at me this morning about the cert and AWS's ELB.

firefox.exe attempted to establish a connection relying on an unmatching security certificate to dw-prod-1737547699.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com. We blocked the connection to keep your data safe since the used certificate was issued for a different web address than the targeted one.

Not sure how you've got the ELB set up (I have had *so* many fights with ELB, it's not even funny) but it's apparently advertising itself somehow, given that Bitdefender picked up on it. :-p

Good luck, let me know if I can provide any more useful data from my end. And good on you for getting off Cloudflare.

[mark]

Oh interesting. Is that still happening?

By any chance is this happening after an HTTP->HTTPS redirect, or is this happening when you're going straight to a dreamwidth.org HTTPS URL directly?

[muccamukk]

Thank you for all your work!

[thistleingrey]

Thank you all very much for making a good policy choice, even though it complicates technical choices.

[casimirian]

Good call by the staff and a clear indication of standing for DW's ethical statement. But I haven't seen what will be done instead. My guess is DW will handle all traffic itself. Should we expect more bots and spam as a result, or will DW be using a different service that provides compatible services?

[mark]

We actually went back to what we used about a year ago, which is the same basic idea (a caching proxy with a firewall) but it's less featureful / more expensive. We're now using standard AWS technologies (Cloudfront + WAF + ALB.)

I was going to investigate Fastly, but you apparently can't sign up for service there without talking to people, and I didn't have time to wait for that.

[cjsmith]

Thank you for everything you do.

Not a question, just another instance of not liking Cloudflare

[feng_shui_house]

For totally unrelated reasons, I'm glad you're going away from Cloudflare. I have a lot of my original art designs on a custom printing site where I earn commissions when products using my designs are sold.

Of course I get pirated often, so often I gave up fighting it- but when a pirate uses my images on Amazon or any other reputable site it is POSSIBLE that I can protest, prove it's mine by showing the URL of the original, and have it removed.

I tried to report my pirated images on sites that use Cloudflare as a 'pass through' and discovered that Cloudflare wasn't responsible because they didn't host the images, and they refused to tell me the actual host site to file a protest (protecting the rights of the pirates since Cloudflare said that in the past when they'd allowed protesters to contact the host, the pirates were defamed and insulted and felt bad). To complain at all required me to give my personal information (including my full legal name and email, etc.) for Cloudflare to pass on to the PIRATE (not the pirate's image host) to see if they agree that the images were stolen. That was a big no to me.

Yeah, so, I'm not fond of Cloudflare's policies. (To be fair, that was years ago. Maybe the policy has changed, but I suspect it's still all about protecting their clients no matter what.)

Re: Not a question, just another instance of not liking Cloudflare

[sackform]

I'd 100% imagine it's still doing that as kf is known for CSEM and they've been protecting that even more horribly illegal pit (genuinely really sucks that you're having to fight against pirates for your work, it's just that if someone is protecting that they're definitely protecting pirates who profit off small indie businesses)

[richardf8]

I just read about this and think you're making the right move. I have, for the first time, bought a paid account so that I can help support this endeavor.

[armiphlage]

Thank you for doing the right thing.

I would gladly chip in with some money to help offset the costs of this migration.