> I really can't figure out from their writing whether this is altruism accidentally leading to great PR or phenomenal PR leading to the appearance of altruism.
I think it's a little of both, they also have great write ups when they screw up (rare, but it happens).
They only write a blog post, however, if they screw up so badly that the Internet takes notice; if they managed to get by because no one was certain what happened, or if it only affected some of their customers, and so the blame thereby largely got deflected to others, they are careful to remain quiet about the situation. For an example of such an incident, I had to spend a bunch of time debugging why CloudFlare's optimization service (which they apparently do not actually do tests for the code of) was causing WebKit browsers to entirely lock up late last year. http://www.saurik.com/id/14
It beats the blog posts by anyone else with a large network. By a mile. Google will say they had an incident, Facebook will say nothing, CloudFare Will show you a graph of their fail.
I take it you haven't seen the blog posts by Amazon? They are always very interesting, very detailed, and they write them even if the effects only hit some features of a single availability zone. I have written about Amazon's postmortems in the past, with detailed links to examples. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4705110
They also, of course, don't write blog posts for every single incident (as I point out in that previous post), but they do acknowledge incidents on their status pages, and they don't seem to filter their postmortems based on "can I turn this into a PR event" as CloudFlare does; in the example situation I provided that CloudFlare carefully ignored, Amazon would have posted something, even though it only would not have let them come off sounding like heroes.
CloudFlare simply should not be getting happy hacker credit for these exaggerated tales of valor... this is just marketing copy, not a postmortem, and it isn't even clear that we should be believing any of the statements they have made. I mean, can you even imagine an Amazon postmortem requiring a rebuttle by gizmodo, as we see for this CloudFlare article? http://gizmodo.com/5992652
I think it's a virtuous cycle. Their selfish motives (attract top-notch employees, sell cloudflare to security-conscious techies) lead them to do impactful, altruistic things. Of course they are motivated by the PR, but what they do really helps and we are happy to reward them.
I think it's a little of both, they also have great write ups when they screw up (rare, but it happens).