Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Do you know of any docs describing the algorithm Akamai or CloudFlare use to decide whether to hit your origin server? I'm a stickler for correctness but it seems to be pretty easy to get into the situation where your users aren't getting what you intended. HTTP cache headers are a mess.
To me it seems safer to code your application so the HTML points to JS/CSS/PNG with content hashes in the URL. Then you don't have any cache expiry issues -- nothing ever expires, but you control the assets exactly through your dynamic HTML.
I think it's important to have fast and reliable rollbacks. You can imagine some situation where private content or offensive text is accidentally included with some static asset... I would like some guarantee about when users stop seeing it (preferably as soon as the application is redeployed).