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Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

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Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#1

Post by wanqu »

Contexts -

Relying on Cloudflare to be the gateway of all of our production traffics is scary.

Currently we are on Enterprise plan, but we don't know if phone support is possible and email support is very slow - typically takes a few days for one reply. We have an open ticket opened ~1 month ago and they still can't answer some basic questions.

Can't imagine what to do if there's big outage on their end or mistakes made by their human operators.

Ideally, there's a good Cloudflare alternative, and we can easily update our dns customer server to point to that alternative when Cloudflare has outage (or caused by their human operators mistakes).

Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#3

Post by ezekg »

This is something I've looked for many times before. I actually don't want the CDN side of Cloudflare (some parts of my app are incompatible with the way their CDN works), but I do want the WAF. But Cloudflare doesn't let you disable the CDN side of their service. It's all or nothing.

Anybody have alternatives to Cloudflare's WAF?

Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#4

Post by saurik »

ezekg wrote: post #3

This is something I've looked for many times before. I actually don't want the CDN side of Cloudflare (some parts of my app are incompatible with the way their CDN works), but I do want the WAF. But Cloudflare doesn't let you disable the CDN side of their service. It's all or nothing. Anybody have alternatives to Cloudflare's WAF?

Have you looked at the WAF from AWS? I am using it on one of my sites to add a rate limit and it was reasonably easy to implement.

Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#6

Post by stephenr »

There are a bunch of alternative CDNs, from what I found late last year there are basically zero other unmetered CDNs though - they all charge for transfer costs, so if your outbound traffic levels are high, it may be prohibitively expensive to change to an alternative CDN.

Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#7

Post by ezekg »

saurik wrote: post #4
ezekg wrote: post #3

This is something I've looked for many times before. I actually don't want the CDN side of Cloudflare (some parts of my app are incompatible with the way their CDN works), but I do want the WAF. But Cloudflare doesn't let you disable the CDN side of their service. It's all or nothing. Anybody have alternatives to Cloudflare's WAF?

Have you looked at the WAF from AWS? I am using it on one of my sites to add a rate limit and it was reasonably easy to implement.

I have not. I'll have to see if it's compatible with Heroku.

Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#9

Post by solardev »

ezekg wrote: post #3

This is something I've looked for many times before. I actually don't want the CDN side of Cloudflare (some parts of my app are incompatible with the way their CDN works), but I do want the WAF. But Cloudflare doesn't let you disable the CDN side of their service. It's all or nothing. Anybody have alternatives to Cloudflare's WAF?

> But Cloudflare doesn't let you disable the CDN side of their service. It's all or nothing.

Are you sure about this? It's been a year or so since I've used it, but I remember being able to disable a lot of specific performance/caching stuff (where the CDN comes in) via its Page Rules and "Cache Level - Bypass": https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/page-rules/underst...

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