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CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

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Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#121

Post by JesperRavn »

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.

If no ISP will host your content, then your message cannot reach anyone, and you effectively have no freedom of expression.

I wonder why you oppose government censorship, if you applaud private businesses achieving the same effect? Certainly your reasons cant be the same as the post you're replying to[0], and so you're missing their point.

[0] in particular 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.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#122

Post by buro9 »

rprime wrote: post #78

Side question, does anybody have any experience with their RailGun feature, is it worth it? We recently switched to CF and mostly use them as a CDN and we're quite happy, good value for the money.

I work at CloudFlare and have tried every feature on my site https://www.lfgss.com/ at some point.

Railgun is the single biggest improvement a dynamic web site can enable.

The biggest benefit is the established connection between the CloudFlare PoPs and your origin server.

The second benefit is the "compression" that is the result of each side having a shared dictionary.

But really, it's the open connection.

The things I tell my friends to use from CloudFlare:

* DNS

* Railgun

* Caching (my S3 bill is so small now)

* DDoS protection (I'm under attack!)

That's usually the order I recommend it too... Railgun is up there. After that list it tends to get more specific, about their web app and what works for them... but all of the above, just enable and use.

If you are on Chrome and install the Claire plugin then you can view Railgun information in the address bar: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/claire/fgbpcgddpmj...

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#123

Post by aagha »

manigandham wrote: post #88

To offset some of the feedback here, we run close to a billion requests a month through CloudFlare with no issues at all. We use their Strict SSL setting and everything is fast and secure and we save a ton on bandwidth. As far as CDN service goes, free SSL and bandwidth and peering + all of their datacenter locations + DNS integration gives us better latency than pretty much everyone else we've tried.

Ditto!

We're a small startup and serve up about 3.5M requests through CloudFlare a day.

when we were using AWS CloudFront, our costs quickly escalated to $100/day as we brought on new customers. We switched over the CloudFlare and made that $100/day cost go away.

CloudFlare's free service has been amazing and we've had no hiccups with it.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#125

Post by maartendb »

I'd love to see more transparency in the way CDNs decide to cache or not cache your content. For example: Cloudflare publishes crawl frequencies in their pricing table but what do they actually do with that content? Push it to all their edges? I'd doubt that. I guess it's based on website traffic, your website pricing plan, ... but it seems quite arbitrary to me.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#126

Post by slipstream- »

duskwuff wrote: post #46
MichaelGG wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, a lot of sites probably just use CFs crypto, without securing it to their backend servers. Hence there could be less encryption overall.

Indeed, CloudFlare will happily run an HTTPS front-end proxy to an origin which is using a self-signed certificate, or even to a HTTP origin. Thought that site was secure? Think again!

If the origin used a self-signed cert, doesn't cloudflare use certificate pinning?

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#127

Post by [deleted] »

McGlockenshire wrote: post #39
pdknsk wrote: post #21

I strongly advise against hosting images, particularly photos, behind CloudFlare. I don't use it myself but I'm frequently noticing CloudFlare aggressively stripping color-profiles from images. Most noticeable if the photo has an AdobeRGB profile, as many do. It makes skin tones in particular look very dull. I don't know if CloudFlare honors no-transform – I suspect they do, but most sites don't send it.

> I don't use it myself but I'm frequently noticing CloudFlare aggressively stripping color-profiles from images They have a service that tries to perform loss-free optimization of served images. It's easy to disable, and should be disabled if you either already perform similar optimizations (optipng / pngquant, jpegtran, etc) or have images with annotations, color profiles, etc.

[deleted]

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#128

Post by [deleted] »

andybak wrote: post #54
pdknsk wrote: post #21

I strongly advise against hosting images, particularly photos, behind CloudFlare. I don't use it myself but I'm frequently noticing CloudFlare aggressively stripping color-profiles from images. Most noticeable if the photo has an AdobeRGB profile, as many do. It makes skin tones in particular look very dull. I don't know if CloudFlare honors no-transform – I suspect they do, but most sites don't send it.

I thought color profiles were a bad idea due to inconsistant browser support. Has that changed?

[deleted]

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#129

Post by rprime »

buro9 wrote: post #122
rprime wrote: post #78

Side question, does anybody have any experience with their RailGun feature, is it worth it? We recently switched to CF and mostly use them as a CDN and we're quite happy, good value for the money.

I work at CloudFlare and have tried every feature on my site https://www.lfgss.com/ at some point. Railgun is the single biggest improvement a dynamic web site can enable. The biggest benefit is the established connection between the CloudFlare PoPs and your origin server. The second benefit is the "compression" that is the result of each side having a shared dictionary. But really, it's the open connection. The thin…

Thank for the information buro9, my company has started to go global and we now serve clients in Australia, Japan, locations far away from our origin server (+200ms) and I am hoping to see a big improvement there.

I'll enable it today and see how it goes.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#130

Post by api »

foxylad wrote: post #111
api wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem does CloudFlare really solve except for DDOS?

SSL. SSL is easy on a single server, but gets complex/expensive very fast on cloud platforms. Cloudflare have an incredibly easy solution (branded "flexible SSL") where they handle the SSL between the client and their CDN, and the CDN does un-encrypted requests to your platform. Yes, this is a security shambles - Cloudflare is officially MITM-ing your traffic. But given the HTTPS-only movement this is a perfectly val…

I'm curious about the difficulties you're referring to. If you're referring to secure key distribution, check out Hashicorp's Vault project. Other than that, I can't think of any show-stoppers to deploying SSL across many commodity cloud servers.
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