I use DO's load balancers in a couple of projects, and they don't list Cloudflare as an upstream dependency anywhere that I've seen. It's so frustrating to think you're clear of a service then find out that you're actually in their blast radius too through no fault of your own.
I find stuff like this all the time, railway.com recently launched an object storage service, but it's simply a wrapper for wasabi buckets under the hood, and they don't mention this anywhere... not even the subprocessors page https://railway.com/legal/subprocessors - customers have no idea they are using wasabi storage buckets unless they dig around the dns records. so i have to do all this research to find upstream dependencies and go subscribe to status.wasabi.com alerts etc.
Hey, I'm the person that was responsible for adding object storage to Railway. It was my onboarding project, basically a project I was able to choose myself and implemented in 3 weeks in my 3rd month after joining Railway.
Object Storage is currently in Priority Boarding, our beta program. We can and will definitely do better, document it and add it to the subprocessor list. I'm really sorry about the current lack of it. There was another important project that I had to do between the beta release of buckets and now. I'm oncall this week, but will continue to bring Buckets to GA next week.
So, just to give this context. There's no intentional malevolence or shadiness going on, it's simply because there's 1 engineer (me) working on it, and there's a lot of stuff to prioritize and do.
It's also super important to get user feedback as early as possible. That's why it's a beta release right now, and the beta release is a bit "rushed". The earlier I can get user feedback, the better the GA version will be.
On the "simply a wrapper for wasabi buckets" - yes, we're currently using wasabi under the hood. I can't add physical Object Storage within 3 weeks to all our server locations :D But that's something we'll work towards. I wouldn't say it's "simply" a wrapper, because we're adding substantial value when you use Buckets on Railway: automatic bucket creation for new environments, variable references, credentials as automatic variables, included in your usage limits and alerts, and so on.
slight off topic: I used DO LBs for a little while but found myself moving away from that toward a small droplet with haproxy or nginx setup. Worked much better for me personally!
The point of an LB for these projects is to get away from a single point of failure, and I find configuring HA and setting up the networking and everything to be a pain point.
These are all low-traffic projects so it's more cost effective to just throw on the smallest LB than spend the time setting it up myself.
I use the LB's for high availability rather than needing load balancing. The LB + 2 web back-ends + Managed DB means a project is resilient to a single server failing, for relatively low devops effort and around $75/mo.
I have a couple of instances of this same pattern for various things that have been running for 5+ years, none of them have suffered downtime caused by the infrastructure. I use ansible scripts for the web servers, and the DO API or dashboard to provision the Load Balancer and Database. You can get it all hooked up in a half hour, and it really doesn't take any maintenance other than setting up good practices for rotating the web servers out for updates.
They wouldn't survive DO losing a DC, they're not so mission critical that it's worth the extra complexity to do that, and I don't recall DO losing a DC in the past 10 years or so.
They did stay up during this outage, which was apparently mostly concentrated on a different product called the 'global load balancer', which ironically is exactly the extra complexity I mentioned to in theory survive a DC outage.
Keep in mind these are "important" in the sense that they justify $100/mo on infra and monitoring, but not "life critical" in that an outage is gonna kill somebody or cost millions of bucks an hour. Once your traffic gets past a certain threshold, DO's costs don't scale that well and you're better off on a large distributed self-managed setup on Hetzner or buying into a stack like AWS.
To me their LB and DB products hit a real sweet spot -- better reliability than one box, and meaningfully less work than setting up a cluster with floating IP and heartbeats and all that for a very minimal price difference.
