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

CloudFront vs. Cloudflare, and how to reduce response times for both (2021)

foxy.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: CloudFront vs. Cloudflare, and how to reduce response times for both (2021)

#21

Post by NavinF »

hnov wrote: post #12
nixcraft wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price is the main difference between AWS CloudFront/Fastly and CF. In most cases, CF prices are fixed, like $200 for business or $20 for the pro plan. If you like fixed prices VMs from Linode or DO, chances are high that you will like Cloudflare too. Of course, advanced addons features like CF Argo and CF Bot management cost more money at Cloudflare too.

While that lasts, you can't be charging a flat $200 in a world where the other players are charging 5-10¢/GB of egress.

I said the opposite ("cloud providers can't keep charging 5-10¢/GB egress") a few years ago, but I guess I was wrong. I still think their pricing is absolutely insane in a world where even the smallest companies can colo a server and get wholesale transit that works out to But I guess nobody's really pushing traffic so nobody cares about $/GB.

Re: CloudFront vs. Cloudflare, and how to reduce response times for both (2021)

#22

Post by throwthere »

The conclusion is for an origin server halfway across the world from your users, CloudFront with Origin Shield is basically equivalent to CloudFlare with Argo (latency).

The other takeaway is AWS documentation is kind of dodgy for some services. But basically everyone knows that already.

Re: CloudFront vs. Cloudflare, and how to reduce response times for both (2021)

#23

Post by TurningCanadian »

nixcraft wrote: post #5
bushbaba wrote: post #3

Now that CloudFront has greatly improved its performance, what's the pitch for using CloudFlare over it?

Price is the main difference between AWS CloudFront/Fastly and CF. In most cases, CF prices are fixed, like $200 for business or $20 for the pro plan. If you like fixed prices VMs from Linode or DO, chances are high that you will like Cloudflare too. Of course, advanced addons features like CF Argo and CF Bot management cost more money at Cloudflare too.

Using CF as an initialism for Cloudflare when talking about CloudFront and Cloudflare is really confusing -- especially because Cloudflare doesn't capitalize the F but CloudFront does.

Re: CloudFront vs. Cloudflare, and how to reduce response times for both (2021)

#24

Post by collaborative »

hnav wrote: post #15

TLDR, adding an "edge" in front of your application incurs a connection setup cost which can be 2-3x RTT and is especially noticeable when you don't have a large QPS and are in a region like APAC where geographically close networks often have high latencies between each other. Both Argo and OriginShield seem to pool more aggressively, often going cross-datacenter to avoid hitting origin which sometimes saves this set…

Surely the cost is offset by cached responses?

Re: CloudFront vs. Cloudflare, and how to reduce response times for both (2021)

#25

Post by jgrahamc »

TurningCanadian wrote: post #23
nixcraft wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price is the main difference between AWS CloudFront/Fastly and CF. In most cases, CF prices are fixed, like $200 for business or $20 for the pro plan. If you like fixed prices VMs from Linode or DO, chances are high that you will like Cloudflare too. Of course, advanced addons features like CF Argo and CF Bot management cost more money at Cloudflare too.

Using CF as an initialism for Cloudflare when talking about CloudFront and Cloudflare is really confusing -- especially because Cloudflare doesn't capitalize the F but CloudFront does.

CF vs. Cf

Re: CloudFront vs. Cloudflare, and how to reduce response times for both (2021)

#27

Post by ignoramous »

TurningCanadian wrote: post #23
nixcraft wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price is the main difference between AWS CloudFront/Fastly and CF. In most cases, CF prices are fixed, like $200 for business or $20 for the pro plan. If you like fixed prices VMs from Linode or DO, chances are high that you will like Cloudflare too. Of course, advanced addons features like CF Argo and CF Bot management cost more money at Cloudflare too.

Using CF as an initialism for Cloudflare when talking about CloudFront and Cloudflare is really confusing -- especially because Cloudflare doesn't capitalize the F but CloudFront does.

> especially because Cloudflare doesn't capitalize the F but CloudFront does.

They used to: CloudFlare becomes Cloudflare (2016), https://archive.is/v1C1H

Re: CloudFront vs. Cloudflare, and how to reduce response times for both (2021)

#29

Post by yamtaddle »

caseydm wrote: post #26

Anybody using Cloudflare to cache an API that serves JSON? Thinking about setting that up.

Depending on what you're doing with it, that may technically be against the TOS on any of their "self-serve" plans, including the paid ones. You might get away with it anyway, especially if your traffic is low, but you'd be rolling the dice.

Re: CloudFront vs. Cloudflare, and how to reduce response times for both (2021)

#30

Post by ComputerGuru »

caseydm wrote: post #26

Anybody using Cloudflare to cache an API that serves JSON? Thinking about setting that up.

We do that with CloudFront. Default is no cache, but some API responses specifically enable caching in the response headers (mainly the version check API).
Post reply on HN