Who DDoS'd Austin?

On July 22, 2019, in Austin, Texas, temperatures soared above 37°C (99°F). That day, the Cloudflare team began using their new service, Magic Transit, on a live network with real traffic from real people and apps. Magic Transit protects and accelerates customers' entire network infrastructure, not just web properties or TCP/UDP applications. The Austin office was used as a test for this new service. After onboarding the Austin office to Magic Transit in an always-on routing topology, Cloudflare began testing its DDoS mitigation capabilities by launching attacks from their Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team. With the help of dynamic rules generated by Gatebot and DoSD systems, Cloudflare was able to detect and block these attacks within seconds, ensuring no degradation in service for the Austin team. The experiment provided valuable lessons on engineering and procedural aspects, allowing them to refine their run-books and reduce onboarding duration for customers.