Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 120 posts

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#41

Post by nly »

NDizzle wrote: post #39
nly wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty amusing that the DNS has such a distributed design yet everyone wants to centralise their authoritative nameservers on services like Route 53 and Cloudflare. Latency shouldn't really be an argument in the case of DNS because it was designed such that folks would be using their ISPs low-latency caches/recursors In theory, HTTP could have been the same way, if it wasn't for for complete lack of respect cach…

Are you saying that Route 53 and Cloudflare don't have distributed DNS? How could they not be, when my OLD PAL 4.2.2.2 has been distributed since the 90s?

I'm sure they have geographically distributed and anycasted servers. I'm talking more the moral or sociological impact, post-Snowden, of relinquishing control of our services to a handful of third parties en masse. It seems that building systems that are designed to be distributed, federated and cooperative isn't actually enough to overcome our natural tendency to want to pool resources and build communal lines of defence against the perceived 'Big Bad'.

Broken middleboxes meant HTTP/2 needed to become TLS-only, which now means middleboxes can't be used at all, which means no caching, which means we all go to Cloudflare or another CDN as a professional MITM service. It's all fairly ludicrous. In principle the idea of ISP web caches was a good one, just like how ISP provided DNS caches are essential in keeping the Internet as we know it reliable.

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#42

Post by chubot »

adamt wrote: post #40
chubot wrote: post #33

If your website is well-coded and administered, does CloudFlare offer any performance benefit? (leaving aside security for now) If a page is static, then CloudFlare can cache it. But if you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap. If a page is dynamic, then how can CloudFlare really speed it up? You don't want them serving…

> If a page is static, then CloudFlare can cache it. But if you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap. With the static content it's not the cost of serving it, it's the fact that Cloudflare is serving it from a large bunch of distributed servers that are likely to offer far lower latency to the end-user than your servers.…

OK, but this is just the benefit of any CDN, not just CloudFlare right?

So I guess the selling point of CloudFlare is that it's like a normal CDN, plus it offers security services like DDOS protection?

With a normal CDN, you don't change your DNS to point at their servers right? DNS points to your server, but you change your code to have and so forth pointing at their servers. To me that just seems a lot less invasive, but admittedly then you can't get the security features.

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#43

Post by waffle_ss »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #38
chubot wrote: post #33

If your website is well-coded and administered, does CloudFlare offer any performance benefit? (leaving aside security for now) If a page is static, then CloudFlare can cache it. But if you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap. If a page is dynamic, then how can CloudFlare really speed it up? You don't want them serving…

we use it on our image heavy startup. reduces the load on the server by a fair margin, and since images are loaded on S3 it also reduces the operating cost quite a bit additionally it's geolocated, so we get that for free, which is nice.

How are you using CloudFlare for S3 images? Are you using Flexible SSL?

The problem I ran into was setting up a CNAME for an S3 bucket requires the bucket name to have periods in it, but https:// access no longer works for buckets with that naming convention[1]. So I ended up having to use CloudFront instead for my images.

[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/BucketRestri...

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#44

Post by josh2600 »

adventured wrote: post #18
polskibus wrote: post #7

How does CloudFlare compare to Akamai? Are they direct competitors?

Sort of. CloudFlare is eating into the bottom third of Akamai's business. A skeptic on that might say that Akamai's is an enterprise, high-end solution, and that CloudFlare is for everything else - and so they don't really compete. My contention is that CloudFlare will climb upwards, taking ever great amounts of their business (as so often happens in tech).

Climbing up is a lot harder than climbing down.

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#46

Post by rmdoss »

dchest wrote: post #14
Nux wrote: post #4

Welcome to the Cloudflare-net. Half the internet is behind CloudFlare now. Since they can't easily "own" the Internet, they could as well own CloudFlare. Not impressed and I hate all this hiding behind Cloudflare and other proxy services; most of the cases are just hipster/hype powered, rather than in actual need.

Time to create a competitor, right?

There is quite a few. One I use and like is: https://sucuri.net that does security + CDN.

But Incapsula, Akamai, Fastly as are good competitors too.

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#48

Post by simonz05 »

solutionyogi wrote: post #22
Karunamon wrote: post #19

Silly question: How does CloudFlare make any money? Any random can put any site behind their (very fully featured) free services and get free CDN, free antimalware, and free $other_services, with no seeming limits as to the amount of traffic you get. This has no impact on the target site. There are no ads or any other such. Their enterprise products only offer a few more features at a massive cost hike. How are the b…

My guess is that if you need a CDN, it's highly likely that you will at least need their Pro plan, most likely a business plan. Other than geeks, I don't really see too many people consuming their free offering to a limit where it becomes a financial burden for them.

We use their 200$/month option. Happy with that.

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#49

Post by LoSboccacc »

waffle_ss wrote: post #43
LoSboccacc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we use it on our image heavy startup. reduces the load on the server by a fair margin, and since images are loaded on S3 it also reduces the operating cost quite a bit additionally it's geolocated, so we get that for free, which is nice.

How are you using CloudFlare for S3 images? Are you using Flexible SSL? The problem I ran into was setting up a CNAME for an S3 bucket requires the bucket name to have periods in it, but https:// access no longer works for buckets with that naming convention[1]. So I ended up having to use CloudFront instead for my images. [1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/BucketRestri...

there is a middleware included :P

we have a document store backed by S3 running on EC2 instances, the instances are behind one of amazon balancing routers and that's what the cloudflare cname points at

currently the beta env runs flexible ssl and production runs with strict.

Re: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare

#50

Post by xorcist »

NDizzle wrote: post #39
nly wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty amusing that the DNS has such a distributed design yet everyone wants to centralise their authoritative nameservers on services like Route 53 and Cloudflare. Latency shouldn't really be an argument in the case of DNS because it was designed such that folks would be using their ISPs low-latency caches/recursors In theory, HTTP could have been the same way, if it wasn't for for complete lack of respect cach…

Are you saying that Route 53 and Cloudflare don't have distributed DNS? How could they not be, when my OLD PAL 4.2.2.2 has been distributed since the 90s?

It depends on what you mean by "distributed". There are many servers behind Cloudflare's DNS servers, but they are all controlled by one organization.

Best practice is to have your DNS servers in different AS. This is not only to have many servers all over the world, which Cloudflare solves for you, but to have them accessible over different routes, not controlled by the same people. That way a configuration error somewhere (or a bad BGP route, which happens) can not put your DNS out of service.

DNS service is cheap and plentiful, and you might even have it included in your ISP deal. You might as well use it.

Also note that if you secure your records with DNSSEC, none of your DNS secondaries can tamper with your data. This is by design. You do not need to place trust in the organizations running them, so that part can be left out of your SLA.

It is also best practice to have all your public DNS servers mirror your primary master, which is not public. This is to make sure all your public servers are kept running even when you have operations issues with your primary.

Post reply on HN