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

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

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's consumed by a web app, doesn't it make it okay? Otherwise any api behind cloudflare would be violating the TOS... > 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed th…

Probably OK, but access it from Electron (let alone fully-native apps) and now you may not technically not be OK anymore—is that functionally equivalent to a web browser? Hard to say. And much of the benefit of web APIs, versus just serving pages and HTML fragments, is being able to serve those kinds of heterogenous clients, or to allow access to 3rd parties, and who knows what they might use to access it, so... yeah, you can push low-usefulness (browser-only, first-party-use-only) web APIs through Cloudflare and you're likely in the clear, but go beyond that and it gets murky fast.

And even then, the web API thing is subject to the rest of the restrictions in that same section ("serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8") so "serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited" (emphasis mine) meaning that if too much of your traffic is JSON or protobufs or what have you, they could send you a nastygram or simply cut you off, though they might choose not to.

Personally, I'd not rely on Cloudflare's free or $20 plans past MVP/experimentation or hobbyist use, precisely because the terms are restrictive and vague. Too risky. Then again, what can you expect for nothing-to-peanuts prices?

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

#42
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.

These initialisms are getting out of hand, to be honest.

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

#44

IMO Perfomance wise CloudFront and Cloudfront are quite similar. I've migrated from CloudFront+AWS WAF to just CloudFlare given Cloudflare's superior (100x better) WAF/Firewall/DDOS protection at a lower cost

Out of curiosity, what makes Clousflare's WAF so much better?

CF have more options, filters, settings, realtime reports, rules and statistics..

Additionally CF ofers a good set of system managed WAF rules that you can simply active and CF will manage it for you.

With AWS you're basically on your own. More or less is a bare bones WAF tool.

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

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think you mean “CF? c.f. Cf.”

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

#46
post #26

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

We do: We use Cloudflare Cache with Workers serving as API gateway handling a fairly low 2K reqs/day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29339642 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24699175

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

#48

IMO Perfomance wise CloudFront and Cloudfront are quite similar. I've migrated from CloudFront+AWS WAF to just CloudFlare given Cloudflare's superior (100x better) WAF/Firewall/DDOS protection at a lower cost

> IMO Perfomance wise CloudFront and Cloudfront are quite similar.

Yes I don't think the capitalization has too much impact.

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

#49
post #26

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

If u want to be as cheap as possible but in line with tos maybe cache manually to r2, then have some logic in your client to get from r2 or ur server?

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

#50
post #48

IMO Perfomance wise CloudFront and Cloudfront are quite similar. I've migrated from CloudFront+AWS WAF to just CloudFlare given Cloudflare's superior (100x better) WAF/Firewall/DDOS protection at a lower cost

> IMO Perfomance wise CloudFront and Cloudfront are quite similar. Yes I don't think the capitalization has too much impact.

He made a typo.

> Yes I don't think the capitalization has too much impact.

You missed a comma.

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