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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

#101

Post by danielcid »

fweespeech wrote: post #92
josefresco wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Google's Cloud DNS product a competitor? https://cloud.google.com/dns/ Doesn't seem like it has the "firewall" capabilities of CF. Also found this: http://alternativeto.net/software/cloudflare/ Because of the size of the WordPress market, Sucuri.net might be a legit competitor.

You are mostly listing CDNs and/or DNS services. None of which are "competitors" to what Cloudflare is offering. Akamai and Incapsula are the only real competitors and, tbh, none of them are particularly "good" which is why CloudFlare has been so successful. Sucuri is fine for a corporate blog or the like but it just really isn't usable for a high traffic site with alot of dynamic content.

Curious why you say that of Sucuri? Have you tried us recently?

We have some very very large sites using our services now with great performance. During the last 6-12 months we basically rewrote our entire stack, built our anycast network and focused a lot on performance optimization and expanding out services.

You can ping me directly if you prefer too.

thanks!

Daniel Cid (CTO/Founder of Sucuri)

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

#102

Post by beachstartup »

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…

you can cache specific urls with dynamic content on a short ttl and it will make a huge improvement in performance.

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

#103

Post by hewhowhineth »

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…

It kinda depends. You'd have to test it yourself. Here's CloudFlare's home page accessed from Europe a few moments ago, via 3G dongle.

http://s21.postimg.org/8gn6f7i2f/cloudflare_com.png

Nothing to write home about :)

That being said, I've seen CloudFlare cutting down DNS lookup from 800ms to 60ms for a tiny website.

Another thing is that it depends if you're really concerned with visitors far from your server. I had some WordPress websites hosted in LA and with some really basic optimization page speed was almost as good as Google's home page.

Don't drink the paint, I guess :) It may not be worth it, it may be great. Test it. Of course, CF has other benefits too, it's not just about the page speed.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not claiming anything here. It's just a quick rant and a screenshot. Don't take it too seriously.

Other than that, it is becoming somewhat concerning just how much traffic goes through CloudFlare. Nothing against you CF guys. Just good ol' paranoia :)

EDIT: For most places CloudFlare does a great, well, amazing job and keeps the page speed down to http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/blmbP5/http://cloudflare.com

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

#104

Post by rdl »

arscan wrote: post #100
rdl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber's moving down from Uber Black to UberX, Pool, etc., but wasn't really an "incumbent" (they are young), and it was fundamentally cheaper-than-limo even from the beginning (by letting you pay by the ride vs. per time block). This is more about big established companies. It's not really even technical; it's protecting their revenue, employee/management structures, etc. built around high-end from low end. It would b…

Tesla is on that trajectory. But the plan was always to go for the lower market eventually and use the higher end markets to incubate the technology, so I don't know if it counts. I think you just need some serious institutional discipline to make it work. Same deal with SpaceX.

Someone on Twitter suggested Nokia; the entire cellphone market definitely moved from high-cost to high-volume. Nokia was amazingly strong right before smartphones. Even through the smartphone days, they got costs down so the delivered cost of a Nokia phone in Africa was less than Apple pays to ship an iPhone 6S to me from China...

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

#105

Post by tlianza »

cagenut wrote: post #3

“The world is looking for their Android,” Prince says. “We’re the Android of cloud services.” I can't tell if this is inane exec-speak or if this means they really intend to branch out into stuff like a dropbox/gdrive storage product and a compute/ec2 like service. full disclosure: I start work for a competitor at the end of the month

I think it's more like they're part of the "Android ecosystem" where you have a lot of choice around fundamental components, as compared to the iOS ecosystem.

I get your point that Android, broadly, is a competitor to Apple. But, I think he's not just highlighting that the world needs an Amazon alternative (it has several).

I think he's saying the world needs a more open ecosystem where they have the choice of best-of-breed components from different companies. And, in that world, you might be able to pick the world's best compute stack from one company, use Cloudflare as the world's best edge/networking stack, etc.

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

#106

Post by pjbrunet »

I liked the CloudFlare concept (protecting good people) until I found it protects bad people as well: scammers, thieves, cybersquatters, phishing. CloudFlare makes it very difficult to contact the web host cloaked by CloudFlare.

CloudFlare is helping the scum of the Internet. They need to be held accountable for what they're serving, if they're not going to reveal who is hosting the site. If there's a way to find the originating IP of these scumbags, I would like to know. Obviously traceroute doesn't work because the IPs show up as CloudFlare.

The way I see it, CloudFlare should be required to publish who is hosting the websites they cloak. Otherwise you're encouraging a lawless Internet where anything goes without any consequences. I sincerely hope these larger companies address this problem.

I hope some journalists dig into this because I think there's a good story here. Maybe CloudFlare doesn't have the staff to review the activities of the sites they're protecting? That's a serious problem, in my opinion, because their cloaking technology is very effective.

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

#107

Post by foxylad »

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…

You know you can switch off image optimisation, right?

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

#108

Post by pjbrunet »

cagenut wrote: post #3

“The world is looking for their Android,” Prince says. “We’re the Android of cloud services.” I can't tell if this is inane exec-speak or if this means they really intend to branch out into stuff like a dropbox/gdrive storage product and a compute/ec2 like service. full disclosure: I start work for a competitor at the end of the month

I read it as: Android is the world leader and free, whereas Windows & Apple are expensive, US-centric platforms.

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

#109

Post by harshreality »

pjbrunet wrote: post #106

I liked the CloudFlare concept (protecting good people) until I found it protects bad people as well: scammers, thieves, cybersquatters, phishing. CloudFlare makes it very difficult to contact the web host cloaked by CloudFlare. CloudFlare is helping the scum of the Internet. They need to be held accountable for what they're serving, if they're not going to reveal who is hosting the site. If there's a way to find the…

Have you thought about that beyond your knee-jerk reaction? One of the primary reasons for using cloudflare is resistance to denial of service attacks, and you want cloudflare to helpfully publish the real IP of the server CF is proxying for?

Scammers, thieves, phishing, and cybersquatting are weak or nonsensical reasons for demanding that CF reveal the IP they're proxying for. If a site is breaking the law, use the legal system to request the real server IP from cloudflare.

I suppose you're also against Tor, because it cloaks client-side evildoers like CF cloaks server-side evildoers?

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

#110

Post by ehPReth »

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's an alternate URL prefix you can use if your bucket name has periods: http://documents.scribd.com.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/91ltsqq5fk... becomes https://s3.amazonaws.com/documents.scribd.com/docs/91ltsqq5f...
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