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Cloudflare announced four major new features that could disrupt industries
- verisimi 5y agoI see Cloudflare as part of the system of control of the internet. They can prevent sites from being seen or users from accessing the internet. I also suspect that their business model is the mafia protection racket - that they may run some of the bots that commit DDOS attacks - it would be in their business interests.
- atdrummond 5y agoWhy is this downvoted? I understand the second paragraph might be slightly aggressive/inflammatory but the first paragraph alone is a legitimate critique. I would really appreciate if those who disagree would provide counter arguments, as both sides here offer the potential for an interesting (and important) dialogue about CF and their role in global Internet/WWW infrastructure.
- verisimi 5y agoThank you. I appreciate you saying that the second paragraph is aggressive, but I think it would be naive to think that it isn't possible, or even probable - if there's money in play. A lot of anti-virus protection companies did do exactly this - create the viruses that made their products sell. Its really not without precedent.
- atdrummond 5y agoI didn’t personally find it aggressive, I was just attempting to understand the motivations of your down voters.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- meowface 5y ago>it would be naive to think that it isn't [...] probable It's probable that Cloudflare is a sophisticated criminal enterprise maliciously DDoSing prospective and existing customers so that they sign up for their (typically free) DDoS mitigation service? It's possible, but this weird logic of "if there's an incentive to do something bad, then someone's probably doing something bad" - with absolutely no evidence to support it whatsoever - is the logic of conspiracy theories (e.g. 9/11 = inside job, Sandy Hook shooting = hoax, COVID-19 = fake virus to control the public).
- nightpool 5y ago"What may be asserted without evidence, may be dismissed without evidence". If someone is going to make the claim that Cloudflare is running an illegal protection racket and funds DDOS attacks against their customer's websites, then the burden of proof is on them to substantiate that claim. Otherwise, it's just pointless bad-faith remarks. And we can't just take the first paragraph in isolation—it depends on the second paragraph for logical support. How could Cloudflare prevent any non-Cloudflare site from being seen, or prevent any non-Cloudflare users from accessing the internet? There is no requirement that anyone use Cloudflare—they just happen to be the best game in town. If you believe otherwise, you have to assert arguments that support your position, you can't just state your thesis and expect people to guess what your reasoning is.
- atdrummond 5y agoAs far as I can tell, he: 1. Never claimed this is actually happening - just that it’s a possibility he’s considered. I don’t think that these kinds of ruminations are so odious and dangerous as to necessitate them being hidden or removed from view. 2. Never claimed it was illegal. In fact, I’m certain the operation as described by OP would be legal (in many jurisdictions) unless there was another component involved, such as identifiable price gouging.
- verisimi 5y agoWe're not in court. But, as I said elsewhere, I think it is pretty understandable corporate behaviour that has been done previously by anti-virus companies. Why would you not take an opportunity like this in order to create a drama where you are the corporate hero, and have people knocking down your door for your product?
- UncleMeat 5y agoThe second paragraph is more than "slightly aggressive" in my mind and it ruins the post. It is a wild theory based in no information at all. Cloudflare has a pretty coherent business model already.
- nsonha 5y agoWhy pick on Cloudflare, what is it about edge computing that makes them particularly well positioned for this kind of abuse and AWS isn't?
- LinuxBender 5y agoI know of a Anti-DDoS company that did this but I won't mention their name. It does happen, but I have not seen it from Cloudflare. If you want a tell-tale sign of who is doing this, look for your quarterly DNS DDoS and a company sending out a trophy sales person quarterly to meet your team. It was incredibly insulting. The past I remember of CF was prior to their forming a business a group of network geeks (not yet cloudflare) had a volunteer network of honeypot proxies. I volunteered some of my physical rented servers for them and a handful of VM's. I am curious how many current members of CF remember those days prior to them forming CF. Their CTO contributes on here, maybe he remembers. Either way I have not seen anything shady from CF yet and I know engineers and leaders at some of their biggest customers.
- aaomidi 5y agoIt's kinda astonishing to me that were fine with a third party company terminating end to end encryption between the service provider and the user. It just feels...so off to me that we've normalized this. Hopefully there will be new standards in the future. But for now this is slightly terrifying to me.
- detaro 5y agoCloudflare is a service provider the site owner contracts with too, so why the distinction?
- aaomidi 5y agoBecause math doesn't break like contracts do mainly.
- detaro 5y agothat doesn't address my point, since you can say the exact same about wherever the site is hosted unless you strictly self-host everything, which the vast majority of sites doesn't do.
- aaomidi 5y agoTo me there's a difference. Probably that terminating tls is base of CFs business model. Or that I'm just being illogical. No idea, just...don't like it.
- detaro 5y agoI'd argue the base is caching and load-balancing. And pretty much everything that has a business model of handling web traffic will need to handle HTTPS for its customers nowadays.
- throwaway78981 5y agoYou are not illogical: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28714516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28714516
- JohnHaugeland 5y agoThis author is clueless. All three of these things were already free. None of these things are industries.
- opheliate 5y agoI would love to know where I can get free cloud storage equivalent to S3.
- rudian 5y agoProbably the misconception comes from "unlimited hosting" providers, which are a lie.
- slig 5y agoScaleway has 75GB for free every month [1]. [1]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/
- JohnHaugeland 5y agoThen google it. Someone else already gave you an answer. "I didn't know you could get free stuff on the internet?" Like. There are *so many* answers Every single one of these things can be gotten for free. Every single one. In fact, all three of them can be gotten for free from Google, or from Microsoft The third one isn't even a real thing. "Hey, there are problems, and Cloudflare could solve them." Oh? What are they? How? None of these are industries This is just clickbait churn
- opheliate 5y agoWhy pretend you don't see the false equivalency you're drawing here? A limited amount of free storage/transfer or a consumer cloud product is not equivalent to what Cloudflare are offering here, or what S3 is. If you need S3, Office 365 or Google Drive are simply not alternatives. Google and Microsoft offer viable alternatives, and hey, they cost money: [0], [1]. If there is a completely free alternative to S3, I would love for you to send a link, because Googling doesn't show any reasonable alternative. 0: https://cloud.google.com/storage#section-10 https://cloud.google.com/storage#section-10 1: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/storage/blobs/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/storage/bl...
- adventured 5y ago> Welcome to the Web 3.0, where your software is decentralized and your users' data truly belongs to them. Nope.
- SrslyJosh 5y ago> Web 3.0 also unlocks the Metaverse, a place where we trade in crypto and have NFTs as intellectual rights. "Say the line, Bart!"
- lazyeye 5y agoCloudflare is the good guy now promoting the growth of the decentralised web. In a decade or two theyll be the bad guy putting up walls and centralising it. Weve seen this cycle before.
- greatsaas12 5y agoSeems like these announcements were part of Cloudflare's "Birthday Week"[1] More features that weren't mentioned by OP: - CF released an email routing feature - They released their domain name registrar (you could previously only transfer, but now you can also register domain names) using wholesale prices. I'd also classify this as a "disruption" because CF is not taking any profit with this one (but they have a lot to gain in terms of data if you route your domain traffic through them.) [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/birthday-week/ https://www.cloudflare.com/birthday-week/
- innocenat 5y agoThe registrar service has been here for some times, but previously you need to transfer domain in instead of register new domain.
- greatsaas12 5y agoYep, was aware of this, but forgot to mention it. Edited the comment, thanks!
- decrypt 5y agoOne thing that most folks aren't aware is that Cloudflare registrar requires usage of their nameservers. It's understandable, they are selling domains without a markup and need to make money in other ways. For those that want to use a custom nameserver, Porkbun is a great choice.
- gnat 5y agoWhat is their business model around having your DNS traffic? Selling your "who looked you up and how many times" data? I am struggling to see what secondary income this enables.
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- moralestapia 5y agoThe big question I have regarding R2 (for those no in the lops: Cloudflare's alternative to S3 with no egress fees (!)) is if the terms hold if you choose to use it to host video. If yes, then wow, this truly is disruptive.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI honestly think it'll get flooded with bad actors and they'll be forced to set limits (e.g. download rate limits, which probably wouldn't be in their best interest since it'd occupy a connection for longer).
- avidal 5y agoCf has really mature trust and safety as well as security teams and tools. I've no doubt they've taken bad actors into account considering all of the other offerings they have that have also attracted bad actors.
- adventured 5y agoNo question. They've been dealing with that factor at hyper scale for many years now. The only question is how they've already decided to go about it. They'll certainly want to make a big splash with the product, given the cloud giants they're taking on. That's better done with fewer limitations initially, even if they know ahead of time the various ways they'll restrict abuse over time.
- distantsounds 5y agoYeah, 8chan definitely weren't bad actors and Cloudflare definitely didn't have to make a PR statement about booting them from their services.
- yawnxyz 5y agoThat's a good question, I wonder how that will play along with their Video Streaming service. I guess this wouldn't be hosted streaming, but a downloadable video file, so they'd have different use cases.
- wackget 5y agoThe article's not entirely accurate. It says the storage bandwidth fees are "totally elimiated" but that's not true: > R2 will zero-rate infrequent storage operations under a threshold — currently planned to be in the single digit requests per second range. Above this range, R2 will charge significantly less per-operation than the major providers.
- heymax054 5y agoThat was the top comment on this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28702997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28702997 The reply was: "Per operation charges, even if at the same level as EC2, would still be substantially cheaper."
- jacobwg 5y agoR2's final pricing isn't yet announced, but my understanding of the quoted section is that R2 will charge for storage operations (API calls), what S3 calls "Requests & data retrievals" on their pricing page [0]. But _egress_ (bandwidth) fees, which can be the most costly component of an S3 bill, are totally eliminated. S3 — Charges for amount of data resident on disk, amount of data retrieved, and each API call R2 — Charges for amount of data resident on disk and some API calls (over a threshold). No charge for data retrieved. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
- leetrout 5y agoAuthor if you are here you have a typo where you say web 2.0 instead of 3.0. Tried to comment on the article but I guess I need an invite to indie hackers and I don't know anyone :D
- greatsaas12 5y agoLooks like it was fixed.
- dvh1990 5y agoThere are special risks involved when relying on novel, market breaking features: Your offering will be dependent on that feature remaining available AND cost effective. If the company ups the price or removes the feature altogether then you will be left without an edge.
- polote 5y agoI know that Cloudflare is always very liked on HN and the CTO often comments here. I often refer to friends that Cloudflare only exists thanks to HN. But Cloudflare is not (neither HN) the center of the world you could have better than R2 with B2 before for example. And no they didnt disrupted anything. You dont disrupt anything in one week actually. Has R2 had any impact on S3 business model or customers so far ? Probably not. Not saying Cloudflare is a bad company, I believe it is one of the few (maybe with Stripe) that is able to still work as a startup even though they have thousands of employees, which is quite impressive. But the article is clickbait
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y agoAgree obviously but I think the message is conveyed about what is interesting. They are competing everywhere CDN, Zero Trust / EdgeSec, Edge Computing, Hosting, etc... Anyone can think of any good historical good case studies on companies doing this in the past? Like becoming oversaturated, not focusing on one thing enough, or just growing like wild fire across spaces?
- robertlagrant 5y agoThey seem to be massively diving into anything that can be computed/stored on the edge, and/or can benefit from a high performance network behind that edge. Which makes sense. Also, they make quite smart choices. An example of one very smart choice is that they don't do Docker for cloud computation, only Javascript/WebASM, and that means they can spin up code in Isolates in V8 that's much more lightweight than having all the infra needed to do Docker.
- robertlagrant 5y agoHaving said that, said smart choice is also an alternative source of lockin, given their egress charges are minimal.
- greatsaas12 5y agoI think calling it clickbait is too harsh. The right headline would be: "Cloudflare announces 3 changes which have the potential to disrupt 3 industries in the near/long future". So it's somewhere in the middle between "totally describing what's inside" vs. clickbait-y.
- latchkey 5y agoethereum [sic]
- pixelgeek 5y agoCloudflare has offered the potential to disrupt several industries. I actually thought that the distributed web workers was more interesting but that is just my focus.
- brightball 5y agoArticle doesn't even mention their dip into email with SPF, DKIM and DMARC record builders. After spending a long time in that industry, I've always thought a solution that was fully integrated with the DNS provider was the ideal. They are just getting started with the record builders but there's a huge potential runway if they want to take this to its natural finish. IMO Cloudflare poses the biggest danger to a company like Valimail or Redsift that relies on DNS automation for their solution. Integrated providers like Mimecast probably don't have anything to worry about. Nor would expertise driven companies focused on consulting, deployment or IT education like dmarcian IMO.
- davedx 5y ago"Cloudflare has announced their "Distributed Web Gateways" which should solve these problems. Developers will interact with HTTP calls, which CloudFlare will translate to PFS or Ethereum functions, while adding Cloudflare added-value services on the HTTP side." CloudFlare is well on its way to becoming the western version of the Great Firewall of China. Centralizing All The Things. Except instead of censorship, it'll be used to make sweet cash dollars.
- yellow_lead 5y agoA centralized distributed web gateway is truly disruption.
- nrook 5y agoCloudflare really is impressive. Who can forget when they disrupted the retro emulation scene, by protecting the website that drove a prominent emulation developer to suicide? Or when they disrupted Isla Vista by serving the sites where Elliot Rodger was radicalized?
- rudian 5y agoOne thing that concerned me is that CF kicked a few "bad actors" off their network One could argue that they have the right and/or duty to do that, but being closer and closer to a "internet backbone" provider, this can become scary. Would you like water to be cut off to "bad actors"?
- robertlagrant 5y agoI think as long as they were given State-supplied acting lessons, it would work.
- acdha 5y agoThose situations aren't analogous: if the water utility cuts me off, my options are things like drilling a well, trucking in water, or moving. If Cloudflare declines not to do business with me, there are many competitors around the world who I can switch to at varying levels of service depending on how much control I want.
- opinion-is-bad 5y agoWould those competitors not have the same moral obligations? Why hold Cloudflare to a higher standard?
- acdha 5y agoIt’s not a higher standard, just recognizing that the situations are different. People need water in a way that they don’t need a CDN, and the options for getting it are local rather than global.
- devit 5y agoThey claim R2 is only free for infrequent access, and the storage price is still really expensive compared to the cost of hard disks, so the potential for disruption seems quite limited. There seems to be potential for big disruption only if downloads aren't counted as operation in "Above this range, R2 will charge significantly less per-operation than the major providers". Based on the release it seems the thing that would be most disrupted is storage and distribution of huge files (one download operation, huge egress bandwidth), which would result in it mainly being used for Mega clones for paid piracy.
- Waspdotmk 5y agoThis Web3 thing is huge. Definitely a cutting edge company
- moffkalast 5y agoThey've already disrupted facebook, run!
- skeeter2020 5y agoany announcement that conflates a decentralized web with cloudflare is premature at best and likely downright misleading. Distributed Gateways explicitly have CF as the central clearinghouse for all communication.
- sdze 5y agoThumbs down to centralisation.