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Cloudflare Calls

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare Calls

#91

Post by itintheory »

rabuse wrote: post #89
yamtaddle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#92

Post by bogomipz »

hn_go_brrrrr wrote: post #30
yamtaddle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The focus on a different place in the stack is really, really key, though. It's what's letting them make the kind of "the whole Internet's middle-man" play that they are.

AWS is going for "the internet's backend". I don't see how that's any different. A SPOF is still a problem, no matter where in your stack it lives.

The parent is referring to concerns of a ubiquitous "man in the middle" and you are referring to SPOF. Those are two very different things. At any rate I can always choose two 2 or even 3 cloud providers for diversity against having an SPOF with AWS.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#93

Post by tschellenbach »

This is the same approach that getstream.io (disclaimer, my startup) and agora.io take for video calling. A global edge network with support for SFU cascading is optimal for the call quality.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#94

Post by anamexis »

rabuse wrote: post #89
yamtaddle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cloudflare is much more than a CDN.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#95

Post by lijogdfljk »

teddyh wrote: post #80
leokennis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 seems to be does the internet going down at the same time outweigh the internet being down for larger periods in aggregate? I don't know, honestly - seems like a tossup.

Is there a better angle to view this from?

edit: My issues with centralization are more about privacy, incentives, points of authority/leaks/autonomy, etc. Downtime seems the least concerning to me.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#96

Post by ghhgfghfghfhf »

shiomiru wrote: post #65

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…

This comment asks all the right questions!

This allows CF to construct a person graph, which is the only power Facebook have in the advertising business. ;)

This will also allow CF to police WebRTC and block people out, like they already do for the rest of the internet. Get ready to answer webRTC captcha(TM) on every call if you use linux or such.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#97

Post by teddyh »

lijogdfljk wrote: post #95
teddyh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 downtime. But my desire to use the internet is very seldom to use one specific service. Instead, I want to accomplish a specific task, and if my usual service goes down, with any luck they will have a competitor which is still up. This is why I think this alternative is better; it will encourage competitors to exist, which will provide a level of redundancy above the simple network layer.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#98

Post by kwindla »

tschellenbach wrote: post #93

This is the same approach that getstream.io (disclaimer, my startup) and agora.io take for video calling. A global edge network with support for SFU cascading is optimal for the call quality.

The Cloudflare Calls launch post is really well written! But I agree that it perhaps somewhat overstates the uniqueness of their approach, given that Agora, Jitsi-as-a-Service, Stream, and Daily all offer WebRTC platforms with a mesh/cascading SFU architecture.

Relatedly, I didn't know that Stream had launched SFU cascading. That's awesome! I'd love to compare notes sometime if you're up for it. (I'm a co-founder of Daily.)

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#99

Post by bryfb »

shiomiru wrote: post #65

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…

I'm so tired of this FUD cloudflare throws around. So far, I don't see a single cloudflare product that solves the purported problem without introducing three others that they conveniently don't talk about.

And when the inevitable curation / editorial / policing challenge of running half the internet does knock on their doorstep, they go "well we're not the ones who are supposed to be policing it, but what are you gonna do?!"

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#100

Post by remram »

rixthefox wrote: post #7

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…

The Cisco of Networking is Cisco.
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