Cloudflare: A Half Fast DevOps Postmortem#

Date: November 24, 2025
Location: The Half Fast DevOps Zone
Mood: The polite nod of a man watching his boat and car roll into a lake.

The Opening Monologue#

Imagine, if you will, a piece of software. It is modern. It is sleek. It is written in Rust, the language of the gods, promised to deliver us from the evils of memory corruption. It is designed to protect the internet from the robotic hordes.

But in this machine, there is a flaw. Not of malice, but of hubris. A belief that a list will never exceed two hundred items. A faith so strong that the architects decided that if the list exceeded two hundred items, the only logical response was for the machine to cease to exist.

On November 18, 2025, the list reached 201.

The Incident: The Rock Rolls Down#

The details are mundane, which makes them terrifying.

  • The Trigger: A permission change in a ClickHouse database. A sweeping of the floor that accidentally opened a door.
  • The Bloat: The “Feature File”, a guest list for the internet, gorged itself on duplicate data. It doubled in size.
  • The Crash: The file hit the edge. The Rust code, specifically the FL2 proxy engine, saw the file. It tried to shove a gallon of water into a pint glass

And here lies the tragedy. The code encountered an error. In a rebellious world, a human world, the code would have said:

"This is too big.  I can't read this. I'm going to ignore it 
and keep working with what I have."

But the code did not rebel. The code submitted to the unwrap() logic.

The Technical Sin: Result::unwrap()#

In Rust, this function effectively says,

"I trust this operation so completely that if it fails, 
I authorize you to kill me immediately."

It panicked. The thread died. The process restarted. It read the file again. It died again. Sisyphus didn’t just push the rock; the rock fell on him, over and over, for hours.

The Rebellion That Never Came#

Camus tells us that the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

In DevOps, Rebellion is Sanity Checking#

We failed because we didn’t say “No.”

The Generator didn’t say “No” when the file size doubled. It just built it.

The Pipeline didn’t say “No” when the artifact violated historical norms. It just shipped it.

The Consumer didn’t say “No” when the input was malformed. It just panicked.

We treated the system like a deterministic machine, forgetting that entropy is the only constant. We assumed the Happy Path was the Only Path.

The Fix: How to Imagine Sisyphus Happy#

If we are to survive the next outage, we must inject a little humanity, skepticism, into the machine. We must teach the code to shrug.

  1. The Guardrails (The “Wait a Minute” Check)

We need linting that acts like a grumpy old man.

Pipeline Checks: Compare the new config against the old one. If the size difference is > 10%, halt the build. Force a human to look at it. “You want to deploy a file that’s twice as big as yesterday? Convince me.”

  1. The Code (The “I Prefer Not To” Logic)

We must banish unwrap() from production code.

Graceful Degradation: If the parser fails, catch the error. Log it. Scream about it. But do not crash. And don’t panic, either. Do not use the new file until are sure it is available.

Fallback Logic: Keep the last known good configuration in memory. If the new one is poison, spit it out and keep chewing on the old one.

  1. The Limits (The “Know Thyself” Rule)

Hard Boundaries: If your code can only handle 200 items, enforce that limit at the generation stage, not the consumption stage. Don’t hand a bomb to a toddler and expect them not to pull the pin.

The Closing Statement#

The Cloudflare outage wasn’t a technical failure. It was a philosophical one. It was a failure to acknowledge that things go wrong. It was a failure to embrace the absurdity of the oversized file.

We are the mad ones, yes. But we must be the sane ones, too. We must be the ones who put the bumpers in the bowling lanes, not because we are bad bowlers, but because the floor is slippery and the ball is covered in grease.

Next time you write a line of code that assumes success… don’t. Assume the file is huge. Assume the database is on fire. Assume the user is a cat walking on a keyboard. Assume that sometimes the universe will look at you, snicker, and say, “Watch this!”

Only then can you find peace.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a legacy Perl script to refactor. It’s horrible, but at least it doesn’t panic.

24NOV2025 - Initial Upload 26NOV2025 - Minor Editing/Syntax changes.