3 ms·
I guess "users" is a confusing concept, but a service like Cloudflare would be an example of a more complex application serving that scale of people.
by gallamine 11y ago
I guess "users" is a confusing concept, but a service like Cloudflare would be an example of a more complex application serving that scale of people.
- tedunangst 11y agoIs cloudflare more complex or less? If I'm connecting through a CF proxy in North America and someone else is connecting through Europe, there's not really any state that needs to be synchronized between us. If I send a message to somebody in Europe, that obviously does need to be synced.
- simcop2387 11y agoActually there is state that might need to be synchronized between the two locations. The cached state of the page or other resources there. CF doesn't just do a blind proxy to the host, along with that it does a number of checks for common attacks and other misbehaving clients.
- tedunangst 11y agoThe NA data center can't decide how long to cache a page without consulting EU (and Asia, and SA, and etc.)? Obviously there is some shared global state (how else would each endpoint know where to proxy to?), but it seems unlikely every request passing through CF is mutating the same global database.
- fapjacks 11y agoHaving tossed the towel in trying to build a global CDN/caching system with relatively few endpoints some years ago, I can tell you that it's very complex. I can't speak to the complexity of something like WhatsApp, and so any comparison would be totally ignorant and anecdotal, but I am guessing that CloudFlare is orders of magnitude more complex than WhatsApp.