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

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

#71

Post by Nyr »

geofft wrote: post #58
chubot wrote: post #42

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…

> CloudFlare can do what Akamai does at a much more reasonable price.

Not really. Akamai has presence inside many "too big to peer" networks, while CloudFlare doesn't (for now).

You can't just compare CloudFlare to Akamai at the moment, they are following very different strategies.

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

#72

Post by pdknsk »

Personally I dislike CloudFlare for the simple reason that they encourage site owners to use their lossless image optimisation service, which isn't lossless. Thus many images appear different than intended when hosted behind CloudFlare. I wrote about this earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192587

Quote from their website.

The Lossless mode removes all the unnecessary bloat from an image file, such as the image header and meta data, without removing any image data. This means images will appear exactly the same as they would have before.

The last sentence is false, at least for images with color profiles on all non-mobile browsers. There are other possible minor cases.

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

#73

Post by aaron42net »

pdknsk wrote: post #72

Personally I dislike CloudFlare for the simple reason that they encourage site owners to use their lossless image optimisation service, which isn't lossless. Thus many images appear different than intended when hosted behind CloudFlare. I wrote about this earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192587 Quote from their website. The Lossless mode removes all the unnecessary bloat from an image file, such as the…

Do they just strip the color profiles? Or do they apply them and convert to sRGB?

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

#74

Post by orionhenry »

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…

1. SSL is terminated near the user - the multiple round trips to do a TLS handshake for a user in Sydney will never leave the city, instead of having to traverse the pacific.

2. Static content is served locally from their CDN. Same thing, your JPEG served to a guy mombasa is coming from a few miles away, not half a world away.

3. If your clients are using old browsers without keepalive, CloudFlare will still keep connections alive from their local endpoint to your servers - making the new-connection cost only occur on the first couple of hops.

4. For dynamic content you can use a special proxy they created which keeps a synchronized cache with the far end so it can ships diffs. If you generate a page thats mostly similar to another page it can just send "Same As Cache Object 124567 except Line 147 says "Welcome chubot" instead of "Welcome orionhenry". A significant percentage of dynamic responses can traverse the world as a single TCP packet.

5. Their devs are really ruthless about keeping the crypto certs as small as possible, with the goal of all handshakes taking a single packet per step.

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

#75

Post by manigandham »

Nyr wrote: post #71
geofft wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> CloudFlare can do what Akamai does at a much more reasonable price. Not really. Akamai has presence inside many "too big to peer" networks, while CloudFlare doesn't (for now). You can't just compare CloudFlare to Akamai at the moment, they are following very different strategies.

CloudFlare seems to be rapidly expanding both datacenters and peering partnerships. Isnt the effective capability the same between both companies?

Is there something that Akamai can do that CloudFlare cant?

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

#76

Post by manigandham »

pakled_engineer wrote: post #57
brandon272 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is part of their security features. All of them can be disabled if you want.

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

#77

Post by mixonic »

andreyf wrote: post #60
chubot wrote: post #42

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…

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 p…

A faster link, but also an already open TCP and SSL connection. By moving the TCP and SSL handshake to an edge-based server, you have much lower-latency when starting a request for the client. The long-haul high-latency connection between the edge and your server is already open, no extra roundtrips required.

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

#78

Post by manigandham »

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.

How do you know about actual need? They offer free DNS + CDN + SSL + bandwidth + security/DDOS which alone can save lots of cost and speed up plenty of sites. Doesn't sound "hipster" to me.

Yes there are always issues with a single company being such a big part of the internet but this applies to many other large tech companies as well in all layers, many that are quite invisible to most online users.

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

#79

Post by Nyr »

manigandham wrote: post #75
Nyr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CloudFlare can do what Akamai does at a much more reasonable price. Not really. Akamai has presence inside many "too big to peer" networks, while CloudFlare doesn't (for now). You can't just compare CloudFlare to Akamai at the moment, they are following very different strategies.

CloudFlare seems to be rapidly expanding both datacenters and peering partnerships. Isnt the effective capability the same between both companies? Is there something that Akamai can do that CloudFlare cant?

There is something which Akamai does and CloudFlare doesn't want to (at the moment): pay big sums to those big ISPs which refuse to peer and want to sell very expensive direct connections.

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

#80

Post by pandemicsyn »

Nyr wrote: post #71
geofft wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> CloudFlare can do what Akamai does at a much more reasonable price. Not really. Akamai has presence inside many "too big to peer" networks, while CloudFlare doesn't (for now). You can't just compare CloudFlare to Akamai at the moment, they are following very different strategies.

I assume its for this reason (and others) that even Amazon.com still uses Akamai. Stuff like product images/banners still get served from domains like g-ecx.images-amazon.com (which resolve to Akamai)
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