Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was your infrastructure like? Were the DDoSes affecting you at the application or network layer? I wonder if there's the case to be made for something like CF but integrated into your L4 and L7 LB infrastructure.
CFs single biggest piece of leverage on L7 DDoS is that once a node in a botnet attacks one of their properties, it usually can’t be used to attack any others for a substantial duration. Botnets rely on being retasked frequently so this dramatically reduces their effectiveness. Volumetric DDoS is even worse: you need to have the peering relationships and hardware to handle Tbps of traffic to an IP you announce. Doing…
Cloudflare Email Service: private beta
331–340 of 578 posts
Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta
#332It's unfortunate that email hosting and email infrastructure can really be done only well by major players. The days of people running and maintaining their own are pretty much long gone. Fwiw, not a knock against CF. I like their products, mostly simple, fair pricing, etc. Just a bit unfortunate commentary on the state of email infra on the internet.
> The days of people running and maintaining their own are pretty much long gone This is very much a myth. There's a lot of FUD around how mail is "hard", but it's much less complicated than, say, running and maintaining a k8s cluster (professionally, I'm responsible for both at my org, so I can make this comparison with some authority). Honestly `apt install postfix dovecot` gets you 90% of the way there. Getting sp…
But in practice, you can find any number of VPS providers, running in local datacenters, with modern self-service interfaces, with at least some IPs that aren't already spam flagged (and you can usually file a ticket to get a new IP if you need it), that are often cheaper per month than AWS, and give full root and everything. Find a service that will help you warm the IPs before you send to customers, and you're good to go!
Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
The internet is worse for me with Cloudflare. I'm using a cellphone router for my internet. My guess is I don't get a dedicated IP and probably behind a NAT with other users. 85% of my request needs me to solve a cloudflare captcha. on bad days I have to do this easily 100+ times.
It is not Cloudflare's fault. It means the website operators were so fed up with bots and bad actors that they just applied a carpet ban and called it a day. Thanks to Cloudflare I was able to reduce my website load threefold and downscale my VMs and my monthly cloud bill, and seeing how 50k daily requests were shown CAPTCHA and not even tried to solve it makes me terrified of running anything without Cloudflare. Don…
Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta
#334Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Businesses want to protect the continuity of their business operations , and to that end they buy such protection as a service, from a business that managed to MitM half the Internet in order to provide such service. Point being, it's a commercial subverting the Internet from inside, reshaping it to better serve the interests of commerce. It is indeed protection, but it's accomplished by reducing variance . 99% of le…
Your first paragraph summarize why businesses want to use Cloudflare and how it helps them maintain their business. Your second paragraph talks about other (non-commercial) sites. I think I'm missing the link here. Why would the admins of such sites resort to Cloudflare if 'fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them' by making that choice? They could very well choose to implement their own or n…
Marketing and free tiers.
But my point is that Cloudflare is addressing threats that predominantly affect businesses, and does so well, but the way it does is effectively changing the whole Internet to be more hospitable for commerce, and less hospitable for any other kind of use.
Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. At least they’re not selling ads using your data.
> the internet was worse without Cloudflare It had much more freedom. Currently it's up to Cloudflare to decide whether you will read that article or not. Tomorrow some stupid law will mandate certain ideas to be hidden from children[1] and Cloudflare will happily comply. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. At least they’re not selling ads using your data.
> To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare It was better. 'Wget' and 'links' worked with most of the sites.
Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta
#338> Today, we're excited to announce just that: the private beta of Email Sending, a new capability that allows you to send transactional emails directly from Cloudflare Workers. So many comments here assumed from the title they're offering a hosted email service, they aren't, they are announcing their own Sendgrid.
What’s the point of it for Cloudflare? It feels like they’re randomly offering different products. Are they trying to be a full cloud platform like everyone else? If not, then what?
Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The days of people running and maintaining their own are pretty much long gone This is very much a myth. There's a lot of FUD around how mail is "hard", but it's much less complicated than, say, running and maintaining a k8s cluster (professionally, I'm responsible for both at my org, so I can make this comparison with some authority). Honestly `apt install postfix dovecot` gets you 90% of the way there. Getting sp…
This is 100% my experience too. Self-hosting email isn't any harder than self-hosting something else and there is no maintenance beyond apt update and apt upgrade. Even if you choose to do this in hard mode using postfix/dovecot instead of a dockerized stack, you can get a working config in a few minutes from an LLM these days.
> > The days of people running and maintaining their own are pretty much long gone
Is less about the pieces you've mentioned, and more about reliable delivery without fighting blacklists, ip/domain reputation blackholes, etc.
Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this not a problem with the law rather than a problem with Cloudflare?
It's both. In allowing Cloudflare to grow so big, we now have one huge universal button for governments to push. If instead all of these customers were dispersed over hundreds of different services from different countries, good luck with trying to keep them all in line with your specific country's whims.
Legitimate sites get blocked too, but most governments probably won't care.