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AWS has CloudFront... it's the same thing.
And GCP has a CDN too. Would you use the GCP CDN in front of AWS, or vice versa? It's fairly common to see Cloudflare CDN (& WAF, etc) used in front of services hosted in AWS, GCP, Azure.
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I think the question you need to ask is: who can build, maintain and operate the needed infrastructure for "task x" better? Cloudflare or you? For many (most) use cases, CF will operate at a resilience and stability and professionality level far above what they can achieve themselves.
Of course Cloudflare can do it better. That’s not the argument rixthefox presented. The problem rixthefox stated was that when Cloudflare does go down, they take half the internet with them at once.
Obviously if you need uptime better than AWS, don't use AWS, or use AWS and someone else. The reason people are fine accepting this is because the impact of "50% of the internet goes down" is hilariously unimpactful - 99% of the internet is just not anything to care about.
I'd love to know more about > Calls uses anycast for every connection, so every packet is always routed to the closest Cloudflare location. Is this true for the UDP media (and data channels) traffic, or just for the initial signaling and connection setup? If the UDP traffic is all anycast, that's truly impressive engineering work. Bravo!
Is anycast "just" (!) broadcasting different routes for different parts of the internet for the same IP address? I cannot imagine this is trivial to get right at all.
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They're positioned to have much wider reach than even AWS. You probably wouldn't put AWS in front of GCP or Azure. You might put CloudFlare in front of any of those. And once you've done that, well, they offer these other services that compete with the backend you're already using.... Their position in the stack has a great deal of market relevance, which translates to risk if they realize that potential, because the…
AWS has CloudFront... it's the same thing.
They are not mainly a CDN and aren't even particularly interested in competing with other companies that are mainly CDNs, which becomes crystal clear if you ever negotiate enterprise pricing with them. The CDN's just a means to an end.
Nb. despite all that their public-pricing plans are such excellent values (though, beware, last I checked the $200/m one was the only one with any kind of SLA whatsoever, and not an impressive one) that if I were creating a start-up CloudFlare might well be the very first service I signed up for. If you're a small fish it's damn hard to justify not using them. And the coils squeeze a bit tighter....
I'm having trouble understanding how giving this metadata to a centralized entity makes the transaction more "private". In the example, now instead of sharing my IP with a therapist, (who I presumably trust enough to... not ddos me?), I'm sharing the fact that I was talking to a therapist with a company I possibly didn't even know existed. Better yet, I suppose I can now be barred from accessing webrtc services if sa…
That said, I’m not sure that leaking an IP address is a big deal for most people. (It might be important in Ukraine, though.)
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> So we're supposed to go use one of thousands of other tiny cloud platform providers? Capitalism requires competition. If it’s only natural that one company grows larger and better than all others, then this is bad for consumers, and in this case bad for all of us, since it limits who can even be on the internet in any meaningful way.
But doesn't competition... well, compete? That implies winners. There can only be so many winners. I do not at all understand how anyone is walled off from being on the internet, if anything I feel like it's massively insanely easier to do that today than it was twenty years ago. It's not like capitalism doesn't have its faults, but using competition to forge winners is literally what it's meant to do. At least in my…
Keeping markets competitive often does require regulation. (For example, common carrier regulations.) Thriving markets don’t happen by accident; they are often tough to get going and don’t necessarily happen without a stable government that allows trade to happen.
They really do want to be the center of everything it seems. I wish they would stop trying to be the Cisco of Networking in the sense of trying to convince a lot of people to let them handle critical network functions for a ton of networks. All it will take is one major outage for everyone to see this is a bad idea. Why trust a cloud provider who could go down and take half the Internet with it? Why centralize it tha…
“Pardon me, Cisco”: https://youtu.be/T47T_mG7YbU
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Honest question, does that matter? Ie if we say that they can do it better than i can, hypothetically that means i'll have more downtime than them - yes? If that's true for everyone, then the internet will, in aggregate, be down less with CF than if we distributed better. Assuming of course that they can handle the scale linearly, and that it doesn't cause them to have a worse uptime than if i hosted. So the question…
> Honest question, does that matter? Ie if we say that they can do it better than i can, hypothetically that means i'll have more downtime than them - yes? Yes. > If that's true for everyone, then the internet will, in aggregate, be down less with CF than if we distributed better. That depends on what we define as “the internet”. If we use any single service as a point of measure, then “the internet” will have more d…
When something big like AWS goes down, it’s just understood by users that stuff is all broken everywhere. It’s not really an opportunity to get more users just because your thing is still up during this huge outage.
On top of that, if the alternative is less reliable than CF, any marginal gain in users during that outage (users that were only interested in your service because it was still up) will again be lost during subsequent outages for the exact same reason.