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Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

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Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#21

Post by ezekg »

solardev wrote: post #15
ezekg wrote: post #3

This is something I've looked for many times before. I actually don't want the CDN side of Cloudflare (some parts of my app are incompatible with the way their CDN works), but I do want the WAF. But Cloudflare doesn't let you disable the CDN side of their service. It's all or nothing. Anybody have alternatives to Cloudflare's WAF?

Fastly has one too, but I don't have direct experience with it: https://www.fastly.com/products/web-application-api-protecti... Imperva also has one, but I can't recommend that one. We had them before Cloudflare and they were ridiculously expensive and not very good. Cloudflare was dramatically better and several orders of magnitude cheaper. That was back in like 2015 though so maybe it's different now.

Looking into Fastly WAF now. Thanks for the recommendation.

Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#22

Post by aknfxb3m »

ezekg wrote: post #12
solardev wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But Cloudflare doesn't let you disable the CDN side of their service. It's all or nothing. Are you sure about this? It's been a year or so since I've used it, but I remember being able to disable a lot of specific performance/caching stuff (where the CDN comes in) via its Page Rules and "Cache Level - Bypass": https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/page-rules/underst...

Yes, unfortunately. I've confirmed it with their support. Requests always hit their CDN. For example, set up a small server that sends the following response headers: Date: Original-Date: Cloudflare will always rewrite the Date header, you just won't notice it until the Date header happens to fall on a time a few ms from the next second (e.g. Wed, 13 Sep 2023 22:02:51.999). This is because by the time Cloudflare proc…

Will your solution work with any CDN at all? It seems the issue is not specific to Cloudflare.

`Date` is a registered field [0] used by origin server as defined in RFC 9110 [1]. Any CDN server will add its own date to that header since it's acting as the origin server for that request.

For Cloudflare in particular, you could try setting Cache-Control to Private=Date and see if the edge cache skips the override [2].

What you want seems to be a tunnel with WAF. In that case, a Cloudflare Worker might be a workaround to the native caching layer but I'm not sure if that has any effect on the edge device updating the Date header or not. Workers do support WAF.

0 - https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-fields/http-fields.xht...

1 - https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110.html

2 - https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/concepts/cache-contr...

Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#23

Post by CommitSyn »

DDoS-Guard has many similar services. Based out of RU. Seems to be used by questionable services more so or a similar amount to Cloudflare. Only briefly looked into them but had trouble understanding pricing structure and what came with what. Ended up using CF.

Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#24

Post by wanqu »

twunde wrote: post #20
wanqu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where to find account manager? i don’t think we have one … this might be a mistake from them or us that we didn’t get one account manager at the beginning … is the phone number you use on the cloudflare website? or is it from some private conversation in email threads with your account manager? we might do the enterprise plan wrong …

You may want to double-check your plan to ensure you're not on Business or Pro. If you are indeed on the Enterprise plan, information about your account manager and contact plans should have been in the onboarding PowerPoint they serve as part of the setup. If you don't have that, I'd follow the instructions in https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/ge... I'd also consider opening a ticket asking a…

yes, it’s enterprise plan…

i’ll create a ticket to ask for account manager .

maybe there’s also a hierarchy of enterprise customers.

small-ish enterprise customers are not that valuable to them …

Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#25

Post by _8j50 »

Clour providers all have similar services, azure frontdoor is one example coupled with azure waf.

But honestly, no one really matches their quality of service and user interface as well as attention to detail. But a major reason to ditch them is that they may decide they hate your ip or browser just at the exact moment you need to do a critical change or troubleshoot something on their platform. The arrogance behind "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude is silly. If I can type in a legit user login with 2FA and I am a paying customer, no security control should block me at all. Google suffers from the same arrogance.

I would use CF for personal stuff but not for my business or at work.

Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#28

Post by jesterson »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #26

I've been in the industry long enough that sometimes I wonder if we have all somehow collectively forgotten about nginx whenever this question comes up.

Indeed. Nowadays people want fancy UI and API, although the same can be achieved with much lesser overehead

Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#29

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

joshxyz wrote: post #27

have you checked bunny.net? i deployed a cdn easily on their lovely ui, would love to hear other people's experiences on it though. bunny for example doesnt have s3 storage api yet.

Bunny has been delaying the s3 storage for over 2 years. I love them but that is one complaint I have. I'm not sure what they are waiting for. They even said they are working on it many moons back.

Re: Ask HN: Are there good Cloudflare alternatives? e.g., edge cache, firewall

#30

Post by [deleted] »

jesterson wrote: post #28
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #26

I've been in the industry long enough that sometimes I wonder if we have all somehow collectively forgotten about nginx whenever this question comes up.

Indeed. Nowadays people want fancy UI and API, although the same can be achieved with much lesser overehead

[deleted]
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