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Wow geez. There's been a lot of BS being thrown around about Cloudflare. I don't work for them, but I have been following the company for years. On Cloudflare

by uluyol 5y ago

Wow geez. There's been a lot of BS being thrown around about Cloudflare. I don't work for them, but I have been following the company for years. On Cloudflare being a gatekeeper: yes, if you care about load, cost, and attacks, you need one. Cloudflare offers real value to their customers by providing these services. Will that lead to Cloudflare controlling the web? Well, you've got a number of direct competitors (Akamai and Fastly, to name two) in addition to the CDN offerings provided by cloud providers. Cloudflare isn't the first CDN, isn't the largest, and won't have a monopoly on being an internet middleman. Compare Cloudflare's network (https://www.cloudflare.com/network/ https://www.cloudflare.com/network/) to Google's (https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure). On the necessity of gatekeepers on the internet: this is the way the internet works. You are responsible for peering with the rest of the worls at a physical location and dealing with the traffic that comes your way. If you want to be close to your users (to avoid bandwidth bottlenecks and provide lower latency), you need to install equipment all over the place and peer with other networks. If you want to deal with bad traffic, you need the capacity and software to handle/filter it. You can always build your own CDN if you want, but the only way to deal with these issues is a CDN. Maybe if the internet worked differently things would be different. But that would be a huge change, especially since someone has to foot the cost of building these services. I guess you could somehow distribute the cost (though I don't see how), but you'd also have to someone deal with the management and development of said infra, and I have no idea how such a thing would work without a central entity being responsible. Anyway sorry for the rant.

BobbyJo 5y ago
> ... have no idea how such a thing would work without a central entity being responsible. Isn't this true of the entire internet? And that exists just fine thanks to a plethora of companies and nations.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  If by "just fine" you mean "anyone with a botnet can take down your website (or, if small enough, country) at will". Thus we have CloudFlare et al.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    My point was: I see no reason why we couldn't accomplish everything Cloudflare does without a central authority. Markets are able to solve just about any problem without any central person pulling the strings. Case in point: the internet.
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      Is the internet a good example of free markets and capitalism? I always perceived the glory days as more akin to communism.
      - simonh 5y ago
        There’s nothing about capitalism that prevents, or is anathema to companies, organisations or individuals from collaborating or pooling resources. Communism is a specific political and economic system with explicit and deliberately coercive communalising policies. It doesn’t have a monopoly on community forming or coordinated community action or the pooling of community resources though.
    - simonh 5y ago
      As has been pointed out there are alternatives to cloud flare so it’s not a central authority.
    - stickfigure 5y ago
      This is such a weird statement. I totally agree that markets can solve this problem. They brought us CloudFlare! (and a few other companies that offer similar services) Sadly, all of them appear to require Big Internet Infrastructure. This isn't a problem you're going to solve at the wifi level.
      - BobbyJo 5y ago
        I'm speaking specifically against the statement that Cloudflare, acting as a central authority, can solve problems that cannot be solved without a central authority.
inopinatus 5y ago
> this is the way the internet works Eh, gotta call this out. The Internet is designed on an end-to-end principle, and at each layer the endpoints are expected to mediate behaviour via protocols. By this architectural standard, middleboxes (including all HTTP proxies and CDNs and what have you) are kludges. They are not "how the internet works", they are the antithesis, they are symptoms of emergent pathology. These are barriers to federation and distributed systems, both enabling and enabled by centralizing forces that divert individual autonomy & value to institutional & commercial interest. They are evidence for Further Research & Development Required, and my belief is we'll eventually solve these problems at the end-to-end protocol level. As for Cloudflare, particularly, their business strategy is to drive down the marginal cost of their own bandwidth, for use in revenue-bearing services such as DDoS mitigation. Every service provided for "free" (some of which, at the free tier, will increase your site latency and lower your visitor count, by the way) works to increase their volumes for use as leverage in peering negotiations. As ever, "free" = "you are the product".
- tshaddox 5y ago
  How else might you attempt to prevent or mitigate a DDoS attack on your server without using things which you consider to be kludges?
- uluyol 5y ago
  > The Internet is designed on an end-to-end principle Yes, this is true, and the end-to-end principle is great. But it's not always straightforward to follow, and certainly is not a religion. In the end, no one cares about the end-to-end principle. They want systems that are flexible, robust, and high performance. In some sense, it's a lot like simplicity. You try to and make your design as simple as possible, but sometimes, you have to have complexity. It's not ideal, but it's not a deal breaker either. Additionally, you have to ask the question: what is an endpoint? "A" server, or can a distributed system be seen as an endpoint? After all, a single server is a bunch of independent components communicating with one another (via infinity fabric, PCIe, etc), so why would it matter if we spread those components across machines (and spoke RPCs, RDMA, whatever)? To me, a service running in a data center with a load balancer in front is "an endpoint" and no real violation of the end-to-end principle is taking place. I think extending the definition of "endpoint" to everything behind a CDN is a stretch too far, but ultimately, I think "endpoint" isn't really defined well-enough to be the unit we talk about.

by uluyol 5y ago

BobbyJo 5y ago

> ... have no idea how such a thing would work without a central entity being responsible. Isn't this true of the entire internet? And that exists just fine thanks to a plethora of companies and nations.

stickfigure 5y ago
If by "just fine" you mean "anyone with a botnet can take down your website (or, if small enough, country) at will". Thus we have CloudFlare et al.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  My point was: I see no reason why we couldn't accomplish everything Cloudflare does without a central authority. Markets are able to solve just about any problem without any central person pulling the strings. Case in point: the internet.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    Is the internet a good example of free markets and capitalism? I always perceived the glory days as more akin to communism.
    - simonh 5y ago
      There’s nothing about capitalism that prevents, or is anathema to companies, organisations or individuals from collaborating or pooling resources. Communism is a specific political and economic system with explicit and deliberately coercive communalising policies. It doesn’t have a monopoly on community forming or coordinated community action or the pooling of community resources though.
  - simonh 5y ago
    As has been pointed out there are alternatives to cloud flare so it’s not a central authority.
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    This is such a weird statement. I totally agree that markets can solve this problem. They brought us CloudFlare! (and a few other companies that offer similar services) Sadly, all of them appear to require Big Internet Infrastructure. This isn't a problem you're going to solve at the wifi level.
    - BobbyJo 5y ago
      I'm speaking specifically against the statement that Cloudflare, acting as a central authority, can solve problems that cannot be solved without a central authority.

inopinatus 5y ago

> this is the way the internet works Eh, gotta call this out. The Internet is designed on an end-to-end principle, and at each layer the endpoints are expected to mediate behaviour via protocols. By this architectural standard, middleboxes (including all HTTP proxies and CDNs and what have you) are kludges. They are not "how the internet works", they are the antithesis, they are symptoms of emergent pathology. These are barriers to federation and distributed systems, both enabling and enabled by centralizing forces that divert individual autonomy & value to institutional & commercial interest. They are evidence for Further Research & Development Required, and my belief is we'll eventually solve these problems at the end-to-end protocol level. As for Cloudflare, particularly, their business strategy is to drive down the marginal cost of their own bandwidth, for use in revenue-bearing services such as DDoS mitigation. Every service provided for "free" (some of which, at the free tier, will increase your site latency and lower your visitor count, by the way) works to increase their volumes for use as leverage in peering negotiations. As ever, "free" = "you are the product".

tshaddox 5y ago
How else might you attempt to prevent or mitigate a DDoS attack on your server without using things which you consider to be kludges?
uluyol 5y ago
> The Internet is designed on an end-to-end principle Yes, this is true, and the end-to-end principle is great. But it's not always straightforward to follow, and certainly is not a religion. In the end, no one cares about the end-to-end principle. They want systems that are flexible, robust, and high performance. In some sense, it's a lot like simplicity. You try to and make your design as simple as possible, but sometimes, you have to have complexity. It's not ideal, but it's not a deal breaker either. Additionally, you have to ask the question: what is an endpoint? "A" server, or can a distributed system be seen as an endpoint? After all, a single server is a bunch of independent components communicating with one another (via infinity fabric, PCIe, etc), so why would it matter if we spread those components across machines (and spoke RPCs, RDMA, whatever)? To me, a service running in a data center with a load balancer in front is "an endpoint" and no real violation of the end-to-end principle is taking place. I think extending the definition of "endpoint" to everything behind a CDN is a stretch too far, but ultimately, I think "endpoint" isn't really defined well-enough to be the unit we talk about.