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Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu Announce Joint Investment in CloudFlare
- ck2 11y agoI can't get to the original link, something forbes is messing with, however this works: http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2015/09/22/google-microsoft-qualcomm-and-baidu-announce-joint-investment-cloudflare/ http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.forbes.com/sites...
- sudhirj 11y agoThat's because the Forbes interstitial is one giant ad that your newly found blocker is blocking.
- cagenut 11y ago“The world is looking for their Android,” Prince says. “We’re the Android of cloud services.” I can't tell if this is inane exec-speak or if this means they really intend to branch out into stuff like a dropbox/gdrive storage product and a compute/ec2 like service. full disclosure: I start work for a competitor at the end of the month
- tlianza 11y agoI think it's more like they're part of the "Android ecosystem" where you have a lot of choice around fundamental components, as compared to the iOS ecosystem. I get your point that Android, broadly, is a competitor to Apple. But, I think he's not just highlighting that the world needs an Amazon alternative (it has several). I think he's saying the world needs a more open ecosystem where they have the choice of best-of-breed components from different companies. And, in that world, you might be able to pick the world's best compute stack from one company, use Cloudflare as the world's best edge/networking stack, etc.
- pjbrunet 11y agoI read it as: Android is the world leader and free, whereas Windows & Apple are expensive, US-centric platforms.
- Nux 11y agoWelcome to the Cloudflare-net. Half the internet is behind CloudFlare now. Since they can't easily "own" the Internet, they could as well own CloudFlare. Not impressed and I hate all this hiding behind Cloudflare and other proxy services; most of the cases are just hipster/hype powered, rather than in actual need.
- JorgeGT 11y agoI use CloudFlare because I like their DNS service; I've switched off proxy/caching entirely :|
- adventured 11y agoSame here. I've had a great experience with their DNS service. Zero cost, and just as good as Amazon's Route 53 in my testing.
- nly 11y agoIt's pretty amusing that the DNS has such a distributed design yet everyone wants to centralise their authoritative nameservers on services like Route 53 and Cloudflare. Latency shouldn't really be an argument in the case of DNS because it was designed such that folks would be using their ISPs low-latency caches/recursors In theory, HTTP could have been the same way, if it wasn't for for complete lack of respect caching got once the web moved to dynamic database-driven designs and the temptation for middleboxes to overstep their remit.
- NDizzle 11y agoAre you saying that Route 53 and Cloudflare don't have distributed DNS? How could they not be, when my OLD PAL 4.2.2.2 has been distributed since the 90s?
- nly 11y agoI'm sure they have geographically distributed and anycasted servers. I'm talking more the moral or sociological impact, post-Snowden, of relinquishing control of our services to a handful of third parties en masse. It seems that building systems that are designed to be distributed, federated and cooperative isn't actually enough to overcome our natural tendency to want to pool resources and build communal lines of defence against the perceived 'Big Bad'. Broken middleboxes meant HTTP/2 needed to become TLS-only, which now means middleboxes can't be used at all, which means no caching, which means we all go to Cloudflare or another CDN as a professional MITM service. It's all fairly ludicrous. In principle the idea of ISP web caches was a good one, just like how ISP provided DNS caches are essential in keeping the Internet as we know it reliable.
- mdekkers 11y agoI am a long-standing CF partner and supporter. This really does not fill me with happy, warm thoughts. I love the CF tech and offering, but am going to be forced to look around for alternatives.
- simonsez10000 11y agoWhy?
- fweespeech 11y agoYeah, at this point, we honestly and genuinely need large CloudFlare competitors. So hopefully one of their competitors is able to get more competitive.
- josefresco 11y agoIs Google's Cloud DNS product a competitor? https://cloud.google.com/dns/ https://cloud.google.com/dns/ Doesn't seem like it has the "firewall" capabilities of CF. Also found this: http://alternativeto.net/software/cloudflare/ http://alternativeto.net/software/cloudflare/ Because of the size of the WordPress market, Sucuri.net might be a legit competitor.
- fweespeech 11y agoYou are mostly listing CDNs and/or DNS services. None of which are "competitors" to what Cloudflare is offering. Akamai and Incapsula are the only real competitors and, tbh, none of them are particularly "good" which is why CloudFlare has been so successful. Sucuri is fine for a corporate blog or the like but it just really isn't usable for a high traffic site with alot of dynamic content.
- danielcid 11y agoCurious why you say that of Sucuri? Have you tried us recently? We have some very very large sites using our services now with great performance. During the last 6-12 months we basically rewrote our entire stack, built our anycast network and focused a lot on performance optimization and expanding out services. You can ping me directly if you prefer too. thanks! Daniel Cid (CTO/Founder of Sucuri)
- fweespeech 11y agoI haven't used it in the last 8 months, so its quite possible this stack rewrite leads to reasonable performance. However, I'm not going to try it on a production website to see.
- polskibus 11y agoHow does CloudFlare compare to Akamai? Are they direct competitors?
- adventured 11y agoSort of. CloudFlare is eating into the bottom third of Akamai's business. A skeptic on that might say that Akamai's is an enterprise, high-end solution, and that CloudFlare is for everything else - and so they don't really compete. My contention is that CloudFlare will climb upwards, taking ever great amounts of their business (as so often happens in tech).
- josh2600 11y agoClimbing up is a lot harder than climbing down.
- rdl 11y agoIn tech it is well known to be the opposite of that. Low end products move upward. It's very hard for high end focused companies to move downward.
- josh2600 11y agoCounterpoint: uber, but yes I hear you.
- rdl 11y agoUber's moving down from Uber Black to UberX, Pool, etc., but wasn't really an "incumbent" (they are young), and it was fundamentally cheaper-than-limo even from the beginning (by letting you pay by the ride vs. per time block). This is more about big established companies. It's not really even technical; it's protecting their revenue, employee/management structures, etc. built around high-end from low end. It would be interesting to find organizations which did historically build super high end stuff which moved down into consumer. Both successful and unsuccessful examples. iRobot MIGHT be an example -- moved down from DARPA and Packbot to the Roomba; but they weren't really established, and those were different sectors. Apple has sort of moved downmarket from computers (and, expensive ones) to cheaper ones to phones. But those were mostly adjacent sectors, not in their core product. I'd love some counter examples where it was within the same product, an established company (say, 10+ years selling the old product), and moved in at the low end.
- duncans 11y agoFollowing this iOS Content Blocker furore, a CloudFlare-type service could be an ideal place from which to inject and serve ads; as opposed to the client-perf-sapping script tags the industry has been using so far.
- scurvy 11y agoOne of their future business plans is/could be to replace your low performing ads with their higher performing ads in far-flung locations you're not optimizing for.
- chinathrow 11y agoWell, that alone makes the move to CloudFlare even more unlikely at all. More huge investors means more control over what CF does and what CF will do with all the data they see flowing through. Bigest MITM just got bigger, at least financial wise. Not for me.
- TorKlingberg 11y agoWhy Qualcomm? They make mobile chips. Are we going to see SoCs specially optimized for communicating with CloudFlare servers? That sounds like a potentially bad idea.
- justicezyx 11y agoThey are the big player in China market, probably only behind IBM MSFT.
- kej 11y agoI'm guessing it's something like this: CloudFlare makes the Internet fast, which makes mobile Internet fast, which helps sell mobile phones, which use Qualcomm chips.
- pakled_engineer 11y agoBoth MS and QC have jointly invested in CDN mobile video streaming before like “DASH: Dynamic Adaptive Streaming for Better Mobile Video User Experience.” Since Cloudflare has full China access the goal would be to take over the local streaming market I guess, sell Xiaomi or MS phones with streaming packages that likely MS will provide or lease out.
- pki 11y agoMS also has china access via Azure China
- astrowilliam 11y agoDoes anyone have a link to a viable contender? I have used cloudflare in the past and it was great but now I need a new service.
- puppetmaster3 11y agous. Apakau.com. contact me.
- eli 11y agoWe use Amazon Cloudfront, but it's more like a traditional CDN so not exactly the same. I've also heard good things about https://www.fastly.com/ https://www.fastly.com/
- Karunamon 11y agoSilly question: How does CloudFlare make any money? Any random can put any site behind their (very fully featured) free services and get free CDN, free antimalware, and free $other_services, with no seeming limits as to the amount of traffic you get. This has no impact on the target site. There are no ads or any other such. Their enterprise products only offer a few more features at a massive cost hike. How are the bandwidth costs not eating them alive, and how are the free users being subsidized?
- solutionyogi 11y agoMy guess is that if you need a CDN, it's highly likely that you will at least need their Pro plan, most likely a business plan. Other than geeks, I don't really see too many people consuming their free offering to a limit where it becomes a financial burden for them.
- simonz05 11y agoWe use their 200$/month option. Happy with that.
- chromaton 11y agoI pay them $20 a month. I needed HTTPS back in the days before that was part of their free plan and kept on with the paid plan. I'm not sure what features the free plan lacks, but $20 a month isn't going to break the bank. I found their application firewall very useful for stopping spam registrations.
- dazc 11y agoI'm using the free option on a bunch of sites. I would pay $20 but, with their current pricing structure, I can't foresee a reason for me to do so?
- snug 11y agoIt's not so well known, but the first pro plan is $20, any pro plan after that is only $5/month. So if you need the WAF, it's a really great price.
- rebelde 11y agoSo does Cloudflare now get around the slowness of passing through the Great Firewall? (Currently, I don't use CF and our website is slow from inside China.)
- georgebashi 11y agoYes, they wrote a blog post about it here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-extended-cloudflares-performance-and-security-into-mainland-china/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-extended-cloudflares-perf...
- PegaCorn17 11y agoCheck out the page: www.cloudflare.com/china Their recent partnership with Baidu might help your slowness from inside China.
- chubot 11y agoIf your website is well-coded and administered, does CloudFlare offer any performance benefit? (leaving aside security for now) If a page is static, then CloudFlare can cache it. But if you set your cache headers appropriately, and use efficient serving code like nginx, I imagine serving static content is pretty darn cheap. If a page is dynamic, then how can CloudFlare really speed it up? You don't want them serving stale pages to users. So it has to hit your server every time, in which case the user might as well hit your server. In that case, I don't really see how CloudFlare improves things. Am I misunderstanding how CloudFlare works? It seems like if you follow typical performance tips like [1] then most of CloudFlare's benefit is eliminated. I guess [1] does tell you to use a CDN. You can save end user network latency for cached static pages, since they cache them in multiple geographic locations. But if you have a simple site with 1 .js and 1 .css file per page, and compress and minify everything, I wonder if it's worth it. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596529309 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596529309
- LoSboccacc 11y agowe use it on our image heavy startup. reduces the load on the server by a fair margin, and since images are loaded on S3 it also reduces the operating cost quite a bit additionally it's geolocated, so we get that for free, which is nice.
- waffle_ss 11y agoHow are you using CloudFlare for S3 images? Are you using Flexible SSL? The problem I ran into was setting up a CNAME for an S3 bucket requires the bucket name to have periods in it, but https:// https:// access no longer works for buckets with that naming convention[1]. So I ended up having to use CloudFront instead for my images. [1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/BucketRestrictions.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/BucketRestri...
- LoSboccacc 11y agothere is a middleware included :P we have a document store backed by S3 running on EC2 instances, the instances are behind one of amazon balancing routers and that's what the cloudflare cname points at currently the beta env runs flexible ssl and production runs with strict.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- EugeneOZ 11y agoCongrats, CloudFlare, I always liked to use your services.
- yalogin 11y agoIs Amazon competing in this space? Since AWS is used heavily in the startup world, it seems like a no brainer to also provide cloudflare functionality, more so given that they have servers all over the world.
- rajathagasthya 11y agoAmazon has CloudFront which is a CDN, but I don't think it offers any security features like CloudFlare does.
- rmdoss 11y agoOh, it does. Their have their Kona WAF... Just a lot more expensive. Incapsula or Sucuri are the ones that compete with a lower pricing.
- strangemix 11y agoWhy was Fidelity not mentioned in the headline? http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fidelity-google-microsoft-baidu-and-qualcomm-back-cloudflare-to-help-build-a-better-internet-2015-09-22 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fidelity-google-microsoft-b...
- maartendb 11y agoI'd love to see more transparency in the way Cloudflare, or CDNs in general, decide to cache or not cache your content. For example: Cloudflare publishes crawl frequencies in their pricing table but what do they actually do with that content? Push it to all their edges? I'd doubt that. I guess it's based on website traffic, your website pricing plan, ... but it seems quite arbitrary to me.
- manigandham 11y agoAll of this is answered in their documentation [1] and admin console help text. Most CDNs only cache in the local POP on the first request and respect the headers the origin sends. The crawl frequencies are for keeping things available if your origin is offline and depends on your plan as listed on the site. 1. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168256-What-are-CloudFlare-s-caching-levels- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168256-W...
- pdknsk 11y agoPersonally I dislike CloudFlare for the simple reason that they encourage site owners to use their lossless image optimisation service, which isn't lossless. Thus many images appear different than intended when hosted behind CloudFlare. I wrote about this earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192587 Quote from their website. The Lossless mode removes all the unnecessary bloat from an image file, such as the image header and meta data, without removing any image data. This means images will appear exactly the same as they would have before. The last sentence is false, at least for images with color profiles on all non-mobile browsers. There are other possible minor cases.
- aaron42net 11y agoDo they just strip the color profiles? Or do they apply them and convert to sRGB?
- foxylad 11y agoYou know you can switch off image optimisation, right?
- dzhiurgis 11y agoThey must have also have some very useful browsing data.
- pjbrunet 11y agoI liked the CloudFlare concept (protecting good people) until I found it protects bad people as well: scammers, thieves, cybersquatters, phishing. CloudFlare makes it very difficult to contact the web host cloaked by CloudFlare. CloudFlare is helping the scum of the Internet. They need to be held accountable for what they're serving, if they're not going to reveal who is hosting the site. If there's a way to find the originating IP of these scumbags, I would like to know. Obviously traceroute doesn't work because the IPs show up as CloudFlare. The way I see it, CloudFlare should be required to publish who is hosting the websites they cloak. Otherwise you're encouraging a lawless Internet where anything goes without any consequences. I sincerely hope these larger companies address this problem. I hope some journalists dig into this because I think there's a good story here. Maybe CloudFlare doesn't have the staff to review the activities of the sites they're protecting? That's a serious problem, in my opinion, because their cloaking technology is very effective.
- harshreality 11y agoHave you thought about that beyond your knee-jerk reaction? One of the primary reasons for using cloudflare is resistance to denial of service attacks, and you want cloudflare to helpfully publish the real IP of the server CF is proxying for? Scammers, thieves, phishing, and cybersquatting are weak or nonsensical reasons for demanding that CF reveal the IP they're proxying for. If a site is breaking the law, use the legal system to request the real server IP from cloudflare. I suppose you're also against Tor, because it cloaks client-side evildoers like CF cloaks server-side evildoers?
- pjbrunet 11y agoI should be able to easily contact the web host and say, "Heads up, your server is doing some bad stuff." This works because hosts don't want to be in business with scum. They take care of it. Because it's the right thing to do, or because they would rather not be involved in a lawsuit, on the wrong side of a PR nightmare. Pretty basic, Internet 101. If I email abuse@cloudflare.com nobody gives a shit. It's irresponsible. A lawsuit should be a last resort. I'm not advocating a more or less anonymous Internet by criticizing CloudFlare. PS: I enjoyed your comment and upvoted it.
- brownbat 11y agoSee also, discussion of the CloudFlare blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10215560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10215560