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CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

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Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#71

Post by manigandham »

kevingadd wrote: post #50
verelo wrote: post #18

I want to love CloudFlare, I really do. We currently use them, but sadly the number of times that CloudFlare has been the cause of a service interruption is somewhere around 50% mark. They are no longer in use on any critical/important end points, I just don't need PagerDuty waking us up over an issue I have no control over. This is not a problem I expect to improve. As they start to cover all of the web, i imagine t…

I used CloudFlare for a while and it consistently caused more problems than it solved. Really hard to debug, too. Injecting broken JS into pages, serving up corrupted cached assets, etc. Better to just pay for Amazon CloudFront or something and set it all up myself...

Just disable all the optimization features and get the benefits of the SSL + DNS + CDN + DDOS protection.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#72

Post by pt »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5
steckerbrett wrote: post #2

It's becoming unusual not to see sites behind CloudFlare now, pretty neat from a routing standpoint and devastating to user privacy and security on the whole. If things continue in this direction we'll have the cloudflare, and some scraps of regular internet off the side.

pretty neat from a routing standpoint and devastating to user privacy on the whole I'm interested. Please expand on the privacy point. I thought the general move to CloudFlare was a good thing for privacy, as it provides an easy mechanism for getting sites onto HTTPS without having every site to worry about managing certificates.

Besides Cloudflare being the biggest man-in-the-middle on the internet, their DDoS mitigation offering is also questionable. If you google "clouflare bypass" [1], you get to websites that can tell you the origin IP address of a cloudflare customer's domain name. So, malicious guys could hit the real IP directly.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=cloudflare+bypass

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#73

Post by manigandham »

steckerbrett wrote: post #8
dangrossman wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more popular it becomes, the more incentive there is for other companies to enter the space and grab a chunk of the money. The barriers to entry are not insurmountable for e.g. existing CDN companies to start offering DNS, WAF and DDOS mitigation products, making them more like Cloudflare. They already have the peering/hosting relationships and engineering teams experienced at working with large volumes of traffi…

Is there reason for people to enter a market with a single obvious leader though? I got the impression that making peering agreements with people on any sort of scale was a bit of a bear. It is already quite ubiquitous, a surprising number of websites use it even if it's not completely obvious, reddit.com has some sort of stealth configuration that bypasses the normal DNS setup for example.

That's how the market works... otherwise we wouldn't have any new companies if everyone gave up before competing with the big guys. There's a lot of potential to do better against anyone.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#74

Post by billyhoffman »

Kalium wrote: post #29
jgrahamc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to understand this. If a customer asks we do do image recompression to save space, and strip metadata (this is one of our services) but would like to know what this is about.

My experience in web-dev is that browser support for color profiles is dodgy at best. Much like alpha in PNGs. It's usually wiser to not rely on occasionally-supported features. PNG alpha in particular was a nightmare for me. After that I knew to look out for the pain caused by occasionally-supported features in images.

This "much like alpha in PNGs" makes it sound like you think this is a recent problem we still have to deal with. It's not:

http://caniuse.com/#feat=png-alpha

PNG alpha transparency was a problem with the decade old IE6. And even then IE6 worked fine with PNG8 images that had alpha transparency. IE7 and IE8 required a 1 line style attribute to work 100% with PNG + alpha, and IE9 did away with that need altogether.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#75

Post by erkkie »

chrissnell wrote: post #59
bduerst wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if you think ISPs should block ISIS websites, domains, and IP addresses.

It should be entirely up to the ISP. Consequently, the ISP's customers can judge (with their spending) whether they approve of such blocking.

Common carrier[0] as a concept exists for good reasons, while cloudflare is not technically required to act as one, it just makes perfect sense to not have to make a ambigious content based judgement call for each of your clients.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#76

Post by voidlogic »

lost_my_pwd wrote: post #70
chrissnell wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried their enterprise tier out about 9 months ago and was entirely unimpressed. Moving a site from Akamai -> CF increased page load times dramatically. We ended up quickly switching back. CloudFlare's complicity with ISIS, however, was what turned me off permanently. For those unaware, CloudFlare was providing proxy shielding of ISIS's propaganda websites. The CF CEO publicly refused to discontinue their service,…

Interesting. This is the first I have heard of this and CloudFlare's reputation has just gone up my eyes because of it. Is ISIS dangerous and deplorable? Sure. Are there ideas so dangerous that they do not deserve to be exposed to public discourse and judged on their merits? I don't think so.

I don't follow; CloudFlare is not the government, therefore freedom of expression isn't really the issue here. Who they choose to give a voice to says a lot about them.

I would oppose the government censoring ISIS; however, I would be proud of any company that refused to to business with them.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#77

Post by manigandham »

zo1 wrote: post #65
chinathrow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those spambots hit hard these days. However, they never ever touch your origin or your CDN at all (check your logs, nothing). They fake the log entry directly into the Analytics systems. Google has to cleanup, but sadly, they haven't moved a bit since ages.

Do you have any insight as to why those spambots would do that? The only thing I can think of is SEO for the "referral" domain, so that they boost their own domain's ranking.

That's mostly why... to get unsuspecting people to visit those referral links wondering where the traffic is coming from.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#79

Post by manigandham »

api wrote: post #61
nly wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latency, although you can solve that through any number of CDN solutions.

That can be solved by using a cloud service with global POPs, spinning up nodes everywhere, and using a common core config built with Chef, Puppet, or Docker. Amazon, Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, Joyent/Triton, and probably a half dozen others will provide global presence with instant provisioning. Slightly more work but you control it. Cost is probably similar. DDOS mitigation is harder and is definitely something…

Cost is definitely not similar. Building your own CDN network is not cheap and CloudFlare provides DNS + SSL + lots of locations + better routing + free bandwidth.

The servers, ssl and bandwidth costs alone would be more than their fees for any big site.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#80

Post by gozo »

voidlogic wrote: post #76
lost_my_pwd wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. This is the first I have heard of this and CloudFlare's reputation has just gone up my eyes because of it. Is ISIS dangerous and deplorable? Sure. Are there ideas so dangerous that they do not deserve to be exposed to public discourse and judged on their merits? I don't think so.

I don't follow; CloudFlare is not the government, therefore freedom of expression isn't really the issue here. Who they choose to give a voice to says a lot about them. I would oppose the government censoring ISIS; however, I would be proud of any company that refused to to business with them.

Shouldn't you also be upset over all the other service providers including your own ISP that also doesn't block those sites? Unless it's specifically against protecting people against criminal activity, in which case we are really going down a slippery slope.
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