Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator

lifeofguenter.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 79 posts

Re: The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator

#11

Post by EduM »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #5

Neat, I didn't know AWS had an AnyCast service like that. The Cloudflare workers issue is a bit disappointing, I remember their blog about eliminating cold starts and how clever it seemed, but I guess it's still not there? On another note have you evaluated fly.io at all for this? This looks right in their wheelhouse of many regions + AnyCast + IPv6, and I could definitely see configuration being simpler with them th…

The cloudflare workers issue should be resolved now, they eliminated cold starts in 2020 (https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-cold-starts-with-clo...) and it seems like he tested it in 2019

Re: The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator

#13

Post by mcintyre1994 »

EduM wrote: post #11
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #5

Neat, I didn't know AWS had an AnyCast service like that. The Cloudflare workers issue is a bit disappointing, I remember their blog about eliminating cold starts and how clever it seemed, but I guess it's still not there? On another note have you evaluated fly.io at all for this? This looks right in their wheelhouse of many regions + AnyCast + IPv6, and I could definitely see configuration being simpler with them th…

The cloudflare workers issue should be resolved now, they eliminated cold starts in 2020 ( https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-cold-starts-with-clo... ) and it seems like he tested it in 2019

Ah thanks, that was the blog I was thinking about but I didn't realise the timing there. That makes sense, I wonder how that would be if they re-tested it now.

Re: The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator

#14

Post by mcintyre1994 »

programmer_dude wrote: post #10
blacha wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks to be a service to remove the HTTP referer header when linking to other sites. Say your on example.com and click a a link to foo.com the browser will send the http header `Referer: example.com` in the HTTP get to foo.com, this means foo.com can then track how you came to their site.

LOL, why do you need an "accelerator" for this?

It's about accelerating the networking performance from the user to a server doing the work. You don't need to do it but it's always going to be a limit on performance if you don't, no matter how fast you make the application server itself.

Re: The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator

#15

Post by sudhirj »

Full disclosure, I work at Fly.io now.

This exact setup is easier on Fly.io - our proxy layer runs in 20 regions worldwide with anycast, so your requests hit the nearest region and quickly terminate TLS there.

You can also run any Docker container, and either choose regions to run them in, or just set the min/max and ask us to start and stop containers in whichever region has demand, so your deployment follows the sun.

Re: The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator

#16

Post by sudhirj »

sudhirj wrote: post #15

Full disclosure, I work at Fly.io now. This exact setup is easier on Fly.io - our proxy layer runs in 20 regions worldwide with anycast, so your requests hit the nearest region and quickly terminate TLS there. You can also run any Docker container, and either choose regions to run them in, or just set the min/max and ask us to start and stop containers in whichever region has demand, so your deployment follows the su…

Also way cheaper, if your container is efficient you’ll probably pay under the cost of Global Accelerator alone, and bandwidth is way cheaper as well.

Re: The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator

#17

Post by Santosh83 »

r1ch wrote: post #12

Using a Rwandan TLD negates pretty much all the effort in finding the fastest provider. No glue records and an unresponsive TLD nameserver translates into 100+ms for the initial DNS lookup (likely the only one that matters for such a service).

Well the homepage of the site opened pretty much instantly for me, and I've never visited it before to have cached its pages or IP address.

Re: The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator

#18

Post by orf »

programmer_dude wrote: post #10
blacha wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks to be a service to remove the HTTP referer header when linking to other sites. Say your on example.com and click a a link to foo.com the browser will send the http header `Referer: example.com` in the HTTP get to foo.com, this means foo.com can then track how you came to their site.

LOL, why do you need an "accelerator" for this?

It’s explained in detail in the article.

Re: The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator

#19

Post by gadders »

blacha wrote: post #8
andrewstuart wrote: post #7

I read the first six paragraphs and still really had no idea what this is talking about. Can anyone help me understand?

Looks to be a service to remove the HTTP referer header when linking to other sites. Say your on example.com and click a a link to foo.com the browser will send the http header `Referer: example.com` in the HTTP get to foo.com, this means foo.com can then track how you came to their site.

The only place I've even seen this is torrent sites linking to IMDB. Does it have a legitimate use?

Re: The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator

#20

Post by yardstick »

andrewstuart wrote: post #7

I read the first six paragraphs and still really had no idea what this is talking about. Can anyone help me understand?

I guess the blog is using referrer stripping as an example to demo/play with AWS global accelerator.

If it was me, I would set referrer-policy: origin (or no-referrer) header[1] and avoid all the overhead. Supported on all current browsers[2], and no additional costs or code to worry about.

Also, does it seem a bit insecure to anyone else to outsource referrer stripping services if your goal is to secure the content of the referrer from third parties? How well do you trust the middlemen in this case?

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...

2. https://caniuse.com/referrer-policy

Post reply on HN