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Sometimes serving 429s/403s to unauthed users is already costing you too much in egress bandwidth bills. That’s one of Cloudflare’s main propositions: stop that
by derefr 6y ago
Sometimes serving 429s/403s to unauthed users is already costing you too much in egress bandwidth bills. That’s one of Cloudflare’s main propositions: stop that “idiot bot that will never get what it wants, but keeps requesting it anyway” traffic outside your network. (Note: not the same as a DoS! Usually not intentional, and usually not actually bringing your infra down. Just costing you money, while not making you any money.)
- danShumway 6y agoIs there a reason Cloudflare can't send a 429/403 in that situation if you're already using it as a middleperson? It seems like responding to a bot and responding to an unpaid accidental request would take the same amount of energy from Cloudflare. The only difference is that a repetitive unpaid request is probably easier to detect.
- derefr 6y agoOh, they totally can, but you have to get Cloudflare to be your auth gateway (using e.g. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/teams/access/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/teams/access/ .) Usually companies who have this problem already have an auth system in place and well-ossified (i.e. with customers who’ve burned assumptions about it into software like mobile apps, that can’t be “forced” to update.) So it’s pretty hard to do a migration.