Ask HN: How does Cloudflare deals with their hardware?

[linkpuff]

I was here thinking... So cloudflare does ddos protection, right? So they must get alot of damaged hardware(because of hard and damaging attacks) How do they deal with it? Throw it all on trash? Reuse it for less powerful demands? Give the usable(but not for their tier) away?

[NikolaNovak]

I do not believe network protection,in this context, works in same ways a physical protection,e.g. Armour.

Network hardware properly designed to withstand certain kinds of attacks will not be physically damaged by their use. Put another way,a piece of hardware that withstands (has capacity for) X number of transactions per second will no more get damaged if it is discarding vs processing them.

This is not to say there's no way to damage hardware with software but I don't believe the question is that generic.

[NikolaNovak]

Further,a successful ddos attack does not necessarily do physical damage.it succeeds by overwhelming the recipient's ability to deal with requests. Thus can cause large amount of "damage" to software systems and underlying business through outages etc,but again,not necessarily any physical damage per se.

[jgrahamc]

We don't have attacks that damage hardware. We do have disks that wear out. We secure erase them and then have them physically destroyed. I cannot think of an instance where we've had to replace a network card because of DDoS damage.

[detaro]

network packets don't cause hardware damage...

[linkpuff]

well I dont think so... because when they(cloudflare) are being attacked, at least the networking boards get spammed,and get hot, ending with damage