If you just want to run a cache locally, varnish or nginx w/ cache module. But Cloudflare’s value add isn’t their cache by itself, it’s their network of caches in 200+ locations around the world to keep content closest to users. That’s the part where you have to have huge scale before it makes sense to try and run your own CDN - it’s a full time job. Giving Cloudflare $20 a month or $200 a month is worth it. If you want A cache but not necessarily Cloudflare’s cache, AWS Cloudfront has a free tier w/ 1 TB of egress a month last I checked - that’s very aggressive pricing. Cloudflare doesn’t have any egress cost at all until you get to enterprise but they heavily restrict features at the lower tiers - might be an issue if you need cache TTLs lower then 24 hours. I’m a big proponent of micro-caching so that part of Cloudflare runs against my designs sometimes. Cloudfront has no such limitations.
Ask HN: What's a good open-source alternative to Cloudflare?
31–40 of 69 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a good open-source alternative to Cloudflare?
#32Cloudflare has become somewhat of a necessary evil. At this point, due to the sheer amount of resources and level of effort required to set up an equivalent infrastructure, they’re effectively a monopoly. Personally, I hate that and I wish the alternative was feasible, but realistically, if you need Cloudflare-level protection, you’re basically stuck with them.
This is just becoming a self-sustaining HN meme. Have you actually ever looked at alternatives in serious depth or is this just an echo chamber? Any idea how many companies in the Fortune 500 use, say, Akamai Prolexic instead? Or other vendors?
> Any idea how many companies in the Fortune 500 use, say, Akamai Prolexic instead? Or other vendors?
Not to mention the big public cloud vendors like AWS, GCP and Azure that have their own CDNs too.
Re: Ask HN: What's a good open-source alternative to Cloudflare?
#33Not ready yet, but the IPVM (inter-planetary virtual machine) similar to IPFS might be a good fit for such use cases in the future
Re: Ask HN: What's a good open-source alternative to Cloudflare?
#34Alternatively a company offering similar service as cloudflare but located in a more privacy friendly jurisdiction would also be interesting.
Re: Ask HN: What's a good open-source alternative to Cloudflare?
#35What would it even mean to be an open source Cloudflare? The entire point of Cloudflare is that they run the tricky stuff for you. As another user said here, you can use nginx and lots of other OSS to achieve the same end goals. You will work much harder for it though.
It's hard to develop an accurate mental model of complete software/hardware technology stacks. Developers work with a lot of black box software offerings and begin to think of every component as just some software implementation they need to interface with.
Re: Ask HN: What's a good open-source alternative to Cloudflare?
#36Things like CDN and DoS protection: you'll need to operate massive networks and machines distributed around the globe. Until someone creates a well-thought decentralized CF alternative from the ground up, which solves bad actor, slow and unstable node problems, with clever incentives, et cetera et cetera, we'll be stuck with centralized solutions.
Decentralized solutions here don't really make sense. CFs entire value proposition is around being close enough to users you can shave something like 20ms off your latency.
P2P is a lot of things, but latency optimized is definitely not it. Things like DHT involve lots of hops, you also can't control the quality of nodes.
Re: Ask HN: What's a good open-source alternative to Cloudflare?
#37CDNs are mostly about having large numbers of servers in convinent locations not software. The software is the easy part.
That said, wikipedia documents its CDN setup which is all open source at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Caching_overview which might be of interest to you.
Re: Ask HN: What's a good open-source alternative to Cloudflare?
#38For many of the features that Cloudflare provides you need an autonomous system (AS) in order to be able to run border gateway protocol (BGP). That gives control over the routing, so that traffic is met by regional servers and infrastructure. If that sounds costly it's because it is.
Re: Ask HN: What's a good open-source alternative to Cloudflare?
#39What would it even mean to be an open source Cloudflare? The entire point of Cloudflare is that they run the tricky stuff for you. As another user said here, you can use nginx and lots of other OSS to achieve the same end goals. You will work much harder for it though.
>What would it even mean to be an open source Cloudflare?
Free-as-in-beer to use everything, shaggy underdog social status, community of free-as-in-beer contributors to leech off of, keeping your teeth clean with some of that floss, and bonus points if you can stick trendy words like "federated" and "AI" in there.
Re: Ask HN: What's a good open-source alternative to Cloudflare?
#40What would it even mean to be an open source Cloudflare? The entire point of Cloudflare is that they run the tricky stuff for you. As another user said here, you can use nginx and lots of other OSS to achieve the same end goals. You will work much harder for it though.
# rant I thought about this for a solid 15 minutes. What really is an open source of version of Cloudflare? That leads into the question of what is really Cloudflare. An enterprise that has built something so huge that the idea it represents can not be separated from the service (as a whole) they provide. That is like saying what is the open source alternative to I don't know....Intel or Oracle. It not only covers a…
Now you made me think for solid 15 mins. What is an open source Intel? Intel has two or three large categories, depending on how you look at it. First the manufacturing arm, that is the trickiest to pin. Open source manufacturing doesn't really make sense, but we do have some fabs and initiatives which have an open PDK[1] and provide technology as a service. I think that is the closest you are going to get.
Then we have their chip architecture, I think RISC-V at least gives us an open ISA but I am not aware of fully open implementations. Then there is the various software Intel provides, everything from drivers to MKL. There are some open source versions of them here and there.
So can we have an open source Intel? Yes, but not in this world. Mostly because they do physical things. And I think that loops us back to CDNs because thats the point with them too.
[1]