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Thoughts on Cloudflare

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Re: Thoughts on Cloudflare

#41

Post by isodev »

kaoD wrote: post #29
isodev wrote: post #19

Very good post. Cloudflare is continuously adding services to their cloud offerings (the latest being Email delivery) in a familiar pattern of "let's make it impossible to switch".

I'm currently on my Nth run of: - I want to deploy a tiny service for personal use - That has occasional requests (think ~10 a day) - Needs to respond to a few daily events: a CRON job here and there, read an email, webhooks... Think a simpler Zapier In principle this would be perfect for any of the many cloud function providers. But AFAIK all of them have this vendor lock-in built into their business model and I jus…

BunnyCDN's edge functions are more-or-less standard Deno handlers [0], if that can count as "standard". But generally edge functions means the runtime is given by the provider and so we don't really have a standard for that.

You could try to implement your logic in a WASI-compatible web assembly script - then things like I/O etc are abstracted and "standardised" (and then you can write it in whatever language makes you happy, though Rust will be the happy path in terms of ecosystem).

If you're into self-hosting, you can try Coolify - they take care of the Docker stuff and support all kinds services https://coolify.io/docs/services/overview (including plain Docker/compose deployments). So with this you could probably find a way to own it completely.

[0] https://bunny.net/edge-scripting/

Re: Thoughts on Cloudflare

#43

Post by mystifyingpoi »

itake wrote: post #36
Canada wrote: post #30

What we really need is more IPV6 deployment so normal people can have plenty of routable addresses and we can go back to hosting more things on the edges like we used to, on computers we physically control. There are plenty of applications where the bandwidth of PON fiber commonly deployed to homes is more than sufficient, and the extra latency is irrelevant. Sure, it may be susceptible to DDoS attack, but if tens of…

Running a server from "home" (or an office) I think is too expensive for most businesses. Paying for battery backups, duplicate internet providers, diy NOC, is just too much, especially for small side projects where the goal is publish blogs or write code, not side-hustle SRE

What if I told you, that you don't need battery backups, that one ISP is enough, that you don't need 24/7 network team to plug a cable from your tower server to a router, in order to host a mid-size SAAS from the office tower server?

Get real guys.

Re: Thoughts on Cloudflare

#45

Post by NathanFlurry »

bluelightning2k wrote: post #44

I really like using Cloudflare. I think durable objects are a great innovation for example.

I’ve been building an open-source alternative at https://github.com/rivet-dev-engine

It’s the only bit of the Cloudflare stack (afaik) that did not have an open-source alternative for the JS ecosystem. I built heavily with DO on another OSS project, but realized it was incredibly problematic that our customers couldn’t truly self-host.

Re: Thoughts on Cloudflare

#46

Post by rwmj »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #28
Avamander wrote: post #2

> Cloudflare has become a highly attractive target for state-sponsored attacks, suffering from recurring breaches. Their sheer scale, considering that they are serving a substantial portion of the internet, means that an outage or compromise could have widespread, costly consequences. I'm unsure how much of these can actually be called "attacks" rather than "complying with local laws" that lets them operate in a lot…

“complying with local laws” isn’t always a good thing. Here’s some behaviours that you need to report in some countries in order to comply with local laws: * someone is a homosexual * someone had sex out of wedlock * someone is a communist * someone is right-wing * someone is a Muslim * someone is _not_ a Muslim * someone spoke ill of the current ruler * someone hosted a messaging service, and didn’t ask users for a…

Here in the real world companies have 3 choices: (1) comply with local laws, (2) don't operate at all in the country, or (3) operate in the country but ensure they have no staff there and never visit. Anything else is going to involve fines and/or prison for your executives and employees.

I once interviewed at a UK gambling company that was doing option #3, and during the interview it was made clear that I'd never be able to visit the US because they were operating there illegally. (I declined the offer.) Some time later, it was in the news that one of their executives had been arrested and imprisoned in the US when he visited on holiday. (https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/another-uk-bettin...)

Re: Thoughts on Cloudflare

#47

Post by itake »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #43
itake wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running a server from "home" (or an office) I think is too expensive for most businesses. Paying for battery backups, duplicate internet providers, diy NOC, is just too much, especially for small side projects where the goal is publish blogs or write code, not side-hustle SRE

What if I told you, that you don't need battery backups, that one ISP is enough, that you don't need 24/7 network team to plug a cable from your tower server to a router, in order to host a mid-size SAAS from the office tower server? Get real guys.

It’s not for me, but my paying customers. I guess I could ask them if they are ok if the service goes down when Florida has a hurricane

Re: Thoughts on Cloudflare

#48

Post by ancarda »

miyuru wrote: post #21

I use cloudflare on my sites because my servers does not have IPv4. If the all the ISPs can get the their networking knowledge up-to-date I can remove it. I have set the protection level to the lowest setting to not trigger unnecessary capatchs.

We're slowly making progress. We're almost at 50% IPv6 worldwide traffic to Google: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Depending on what country you're in and what your traffic patterns look like, it might be higher. Some countries are >70% IPv6 traffic to Google.

Do you ever check your access logs to see when you're ready to go IPv6 only?

Re: Thoughts on Cloudflare

#49

Post by nromiun »

I actually looked at all the alternatives listed by the author. Here is the problem: none of them are competitive with Cloudflare. With Cloudflare you don't even need to provide a credit card, just setup with your website and it is "free" for lifetime.

They might pressure you to switch to paid plans if you start getting PBs of traffic, but until that point they will deliver your content for free. It is a huge advantage. Specially when you consider the egress pricing of major cloud providers.

Re: Thoughts on Cloudflare

#50

Post by deadbabe »

Cloudflare isn’t perfect but people do have other options, and yet they come back to Cloudflare. Without Cloudflare it is more likely the internet would be a shittier less secure place. I think there are worse companies to worry about out there.

Will their power only grow? Yup.

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