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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

#81

Post by bad_user »

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 you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap

If the website is serving content (i.e. articles, images, movies, you know, the normal use-case) then most people visiting a page will be first time visitors on that page. The cache headers you mention are only good for returning visitors and even so, the local cache is not reliable on mobile phones where the cache is being purged regularly to make room. Consider that there are mobile web developers that have decided to not use JQuery for this reason, even though JQuery is probably the most cached piece of JS in the world.

Also serving content from a properly configured Nginx doesn't help with network latency. Say, if your server is in the US and your visitors are in Japan or China, then the added network latency can be measured in seconds. The problem gets even worse for HTTPS connections because of that handshake. And consider that Google found an extra .5 seconds of latency in delivering their search result costs them a 20% drop in traffic, or that for Amazon 100ms of added latency costs them 1% in sales.

> If a page is dynamic, then how can CloudFlare really speed it up?

Even if the page contains dynamic content, you always have static content that you want to serve from a CDN.

You also forgot probably the biggest benefit for us - bandwidth ends up being freaking expensive and if you get a lot of traffic, then a CDN can save you a lot of money.

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

#82

Post by manigandham »

Nyr wrote: post #79
manigandham wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does this mean for the company/application using CloudFlare or Akamai?

Both services seem to be highly available and very fast from around the world. What does Akamai do here that's better?

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

#83

Post by rmdoss »

rajathagasthya wrote: post #59
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.

Oh, it does. Their have their Kona WAF... Just a lot more expensive.

Incapsula or Sucuri are the ones that compete with a lower pricing.

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

#84

Post by manigandham »

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…

They have the answer about bandwidth here [1] and on some blog posts [2].

> We buy our bandwidth through the wholesale market, which means we're paying for the size of our pipe, not for each byte we serve through it. We also peer with other networks wherever possible in order to drive the cost of bandwidth as close to zero as possible.

1. https://www.cloudflare.com/features-cdn

2. https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...

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

#85

Post by hyperpape »

bad_user wrote: post #81
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 you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap If the website is serving content (i.e. articles, images, movies, you know, the normal use-case) then most people visiting a page will be first time visitors on that page. The cache headers you mention are only good for returning visitors and even so, the local cache is not r…

There's a nice facebook study on how frequently people were not receiving cached images, and it was around 44% of all users (25% of all hits). If you figure that Facebook is going to have some of the better numbers for that metric, it supports your conclusion: https://code.facebook.com/posts/964122680272229/web-performa....

There was a similar exercise done with hosted versions of jquery, but I can't remember who did it or find a link, I'm afraid.

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

#86

Post by manigandham »

maartendb wrote: post #63

I'd love to see more transparency in the way Cloudflare, or CDNs in general, 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.

All of this is answered in their documentation [1] and admin console help text.

Most CDNs only cache in the local POP on the first request and respect the headers the origin sends. The crawl frequencies are for keeping things available if your origin is offline and depends on your plan as listed on the site.

1. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168256-W...

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

#87

Post by manigandham »

nly wrote: post #41
NDizzle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

HTTP/2 is not TLS only and does not require encryption.

However if you are using encryption, how do you expect ISP caches to work? Like you said "middleboxes can't be used at all".

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

#88

Post by Tobu »

simonsez10000 wrote: post #9
mdekkers wrote: post #5

I am a long-standing CF partner and supporter. This really does not fill me with happy, warm thoughts. I love the CF tech and offering, but am going to be forced to look around for alternatives.

Why?

Because CF becomes a tempting kill switch.

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

#89

Post by snowwrestler »

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 you leave aside security, of course Cloudflare is not going to look like a great benefit. Security is what Cloudflare provides as a service. The "CDN" benefits are a nice consequence of the security, but CDNs and static caching can be had for pretty cheap.

The real question is: why would you leave aside security?

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

#90

Post by philip1209 »

dublinben wrote: post #70
philip1209 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consumer freemium model is probably negligible money in the grand scheme of things. Here is an article about how Cloudflare developed a keyless SSL tool to bring Goldman Sachs on as a client: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/new-internet-security-tool-guar... Downtime is expensive for large companies, including financial institutions. A DDOS that takes down the site could cause a dip in the stock price. CloudFlare te…

Wouldn't any large enterprise client like this already have a CDN or DDOS-proof hosting provider?

I don't know for sure, but they likely have to provide a private key to these providers. Other big disadvantage of a "DDOS-proof hosting provider" is that they likely are not distributed, so absorbing large DDOS is hard.
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