Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by skuhn » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:39 PM UTC

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…

I wondered about this too, especially since their marketing makes a huge deal about how "We never charge for bandwidth" [1]. It turns out that enterprise plans don't exactly charge per-gigabyte like other CDNs, but the cost does increase based on your bandwidth usage.

There aren't a ton of explicitly called out features that require an enterprise deal, but I expect a customer of any significant size will be under one (or encouraged to do so). It's the only way to get an SLA and to modify the terms of your contract with them, among other things that businesses care about.

As a result of the difference in price between the plan types, I would speculate that the service is subsidized by the enterprise customers. However, the free or lower cost customers were probably essential to building their peering relationships before they had significant enterprise users, and that has a very direct relationship with their cost to serve traffic.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/plans

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

#52

Post by brandon272 » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:41 PM UTC

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…

I was using CloudFlare on a site that has a wide overseas following with a lot of visitors from different continents. I was getting a lot of complaints that the site was terribly slow. When I went back to just serving the site directly from it's server in Atlanta, the complaints ceased.

Since then I have been hesitant to use it again.

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

#53

Post by rdl » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:42 PM UTC

josh2600 wrote: post #44

adventured wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In tech it is well known to be the opposite of that. Low end products move upward. It's very hard for high end focused companies to move downward.

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

#54

Post by justicezyx » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:42 PM UTC

TorKlingberg wrote: post #11

Why Qualcomm? They make mobile chips. Are we going to see SoCs specially optimized for communicating with CloudFlare servers? That sounds like a potentially bad idea.

They are the big player in China market, probably only behind IBM MSFT.

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

#55

Post by yalogin » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:52 PM UTC

Is Amazon competing in this space? Since AWS is used heavily in the startup world, it seems like a no brainer to also provide cloudflare functionality, more so given that they have servers all over the world.

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

#56

Post by kej » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:53 PM UTC

TorKlingberg wrote: post #11

Why Qualcomm? They make mobile chips. Are we going to see SoCs specially optimized for communicating with CloudFlare servers? That sounds like a potentially bad idea.

I'm guessing it's something like this: CloudFlare makes the Internet fast, which makes mobile Internet fast, which helps sell mobile phones, which use Qualcomm chips.

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

#57

Post by pakled_engineer » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

brandon272 wrote: post #52

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…

I was using CloudFlare on a site that has a wide overseas following with a lot of visitors from different continents. I was getting a lot of complaints that the site was terribly slow. When I went back to just serving the site directly from it's server in Atlanta, the complaints ceased. Since then I have been hesitant to use it again.

You get a lot of "testing your browser" delays if you're from certain regions, also the annoying captcha gateway if behind a big mobile NAT that was blacklisted somewhere because of one spammer or maliscious user, or if using some VPNs/Tor especially the free tier VPNs

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

#58

Post by geofft » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 4:57 PM UTC

chubot wrote: post #42

adamt wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 invasiv…

I'd say that the historic Akamai model (from the last bubble) counts as "a normal CDN", and in that case, you do change your DNS to point straight at Akamai's DNS servers. For well over a decade now, `www.microsoft.com` has been a CNAME for something run by Akamai.

My rough and uninformed impression is that for small-time users, where "small-time" includes the scale of Reddit, CloudFlare can do what Akamai does at a much more reasonable price.

But yes, that's a different sense of "CDN" from e.g. Google-hosted jQuery.

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

#59

Post by rajathagasthya » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #55

Is Amazon competing in this space? Since AWS is used heavily in the startup world, it seems like a no brainer to also provide cloudflare functionality, more so given that they have servers all over the world.

Amazon has CloudFront which is a CDN, but I don't think it offers any security features like CloudFlare does.

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

#60

Post by andreyf » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

chubot wrote: post #42

adamt wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 invasiv…

Well, routing everything through them via DNS obviously means less code in your application, so that's nice.

Also, a CDN which routes all of your traffic via DNS can also take advantage of a private network to get the packets to your users faster, i.e. Cloudflare could potentially own a faster link between Virginia and Berlin than the public internet would take, and lower response time that way. I think that's what point two on the benefits list here is about: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-is-now-a-google-cloud...