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I don't think it is a good idea with a single company proxying a significant amount of internet's traffic.

by nubela 9y ago

koolba 9y ago
And we have a real world example of how far things spread when the proverbial shit hits the fan.
SEJeff 9y ago
cough Cloudbleed cough
manigandham 9y ago
There are no other companies that match the functionality and price combination that Cloudflare provides. For most businesses, it's a better value regardless of centralization. It's unfortunate there isn't stronger competition even though Cloudflare continues to innovate.
- user5994461 9y ago
  The competition is akamai. They've been here for much longer than cloudflare.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    At the price of Cloudflare? Or all the newer features? Don't think so.
laumars 9y ago
While I agree with your sentiment in theory, CloudFlare are far from being the only company that handles a significant amount of internet traffic and pragmatically there will always be a need for such organisations to exist. eg if you want DDoS protection, or geolocated content delivery end points, or the ability to scale traffic cost effectively should your content go viral. Heck, even without discussing cloud services you still have privately owned backbones to the internet that can cause mayhem when they experience disruptions to service.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deno 9y ago
  > eg if you want DDoS protection, or geolocated content delivery end points, or the ability to scale traffic cost effectively should your content go viral None of those things require CDN. Doing your own SSL termination is not hard. And HTTP 2.0 almost let’s you get away without it.
  - laumars 9y ago
    > None of those things require CDN. I wasn't implying you required a CDN to address those points. The issue the GP raised was about "a single company proxying a significant amount of internet's traffic" which is a much larger topic than with regards to CDN alone. However to address your point specifically, many of the larger players in the CDN market do tout the features I discussed as a key reason to use their infrastructure. Which makes a lot of sense because if you are going use a proxying CDN like Akamai, CloudFlare or CloudFront then you would expect some level of DDoS mitigation, geolocated nodes, and, most importantly, offloading. > Doing your own SSL termination is not hard. And HTTP 2.0 almost let’s you get away without it. SSL termination is completely irrelevant to the points myself and the GP raised. While some low traffic blog sites might use (for example) CloudFlare for their free SSL termination (less of an issue these days with the likes of LetsEncrypt) it's fair to say that the vast majority of CDN-proxied traffic is behind a CDN for reasons other than obtaining a free SSL certificate - reasons such as those I described above. Source: my experience delivering a multitude of high profile, high traffic sites (eg 100,000+ concurrent users) for a variety of different clients.
    - deno 9y ago
      SSL termination is the most latency sensitive thing in the stack, I wasn’t talking about provisioning. With HTTP 2.0 you get to reuse the connection, so it’s not as critical. Anyway my point was you can get all those features without involving heavy L7 multitenant MITMaaS. I stand by it. > Which makes a lot of sense because if you are going use a proxying CDN Yes, but is proxying CDN the most optimal solution if you need those features. Isn’t that the relevant question.

I don't think it is a good idea with a single company proxying a significant amount of internet's traffic.

by nubela 9y ago

I don't think it is a good idea with a single company proxying a significant amount of internet's traffic.

koolba 9y ago

And we have a real world example of how far things spread when the proverbial shit hits the fan.

SEJeff 9y ago

cough Cloudbleed cough

manigandham 9y ago

There are no other companies that match the functionality and price combination that Cloudflare provides. For most businesses, it's a better value regardless of centralization. It's unfortunate there isn't stronger competition even though Cloudflare continues to innovate.

user5994461 9y ago
The competition is akamai. They've been here for much longer than cloudflare.
- manigandham 9y ago
  At the price of Cloudflare? Or all the newer features? Don't think so.

laumars 9y ago

While I agree with your sentiment in theory, CloudFlare are far from being the only company that handles a significant amount of internet traffic and pragmatically there will always be a need for such organisations to exist. eg if you want DDoS protection, or geolocated content delivery end points, or the ability to scale traffic cost effectively should your content go viral. Heck, even without discussing cloud services you still have privately owned backbones to the internet that can cause mayhem when they experience disruptions to service.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deno 9y ago
> eg if you want DDoS protection, or geolocated content delivery end points, or the ability to scale traffic cost effectively should your content go viral None of those things require CDN. Doing your own SSL termination is not hard. And HTTP 2.0 almost let’s you get away without it.
- laumars 9y ago
  > None of those things require CDN. I wasn't implying you required a CDN to address those points. The issue the GP raised was about "a single company proxying a significant amount of internet's traffic" which is a much larger topic than with regards to CDN alone. However to address your point specifically, many of the larger players in the CDN market do tout the features I discussed as a key reason to use their infrastructure. Which makes a lot of sense because if you are going use a proxying CDN like Akamai, CloudFlare or CloudFront then you would expect some level of DDoS mitigation, geolocated nodes, and, most importantly, offloading. > Doing your own SSL termination is not hard. And HTTP 2.0 almost let’s you get away without it. SSL termination is completely irrelevant to the points myself and the GP raised. While some low traffic blog sites might use (for example) CloudFlare for their free SSL termination (less of an issue these days with the likes of LetsEncrypt) it's fair to say that the vast majority of CDN-proxied traffic is behind a CDN for reasons other than obtaining a free SSL certificate - reasons such as those I described above. Source: my experience delivering a multitude of high profile, high traffic sites (eg 100,000+ concurrent users) for a variety of different clients.
  - deno 9y ago
    SSL termination is the most latency sensitive thing in the stack, I wasn’t talking about provisioning. With HTTP 2.0 you get to reuse the connection, so it’s not as critical. Anyway my point was you can get all those features without involving heavy L7 multitenant MITMaaS. I stand by it. > Which makes a lot of sense because if you are going use a proxying CDN Yes, but is proxying CDN the most optimal solution if you need those features. Isn’t that the relevant question.