4 ms·
> SSL is a solved problem since let's encrypt Only if you remember to update your cert chains, and your web servers have to keep up with TLS etc. updates too
by technobabbler 5y ago
> SSL is a solved problem since let's encrypt
Only if you remember to update your cert chains, and your web servers have to keep up with TLS etc. updates too
> cloudflare actually decreases performance (by adding an hop when serving dynamic content).
If your dynamic content doesn't require true real-time updates (like a forum or chat or something), but can be limited to once a minute updates or similar (like a reddit-style front page), caching and global CDNs can still drastically speed that up for users who aren't near your data center.
And that's just their static cache offering. If you build your site around their edge infrastructure (workers, workers KV, durable objects), you can entirely remove the last hop by handling client requests and sharing state across the CDN itself. Two of their demos show IRC-like chat and Doom (the game) running entirely on the edge:
https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-chat-demo https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-chat-demo
https://blog.cloudflare.com/doom-multiplayer-workers/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/doom-multiplayer-workers/
They also do other performance boosts, like auto-optimizing images, converting to webp, minifying stylesheets & scripts, dynamic loading, http QUIC, etc. And they offer a edge streaming solution for video (although Vimeo is probably much cheaper for most use cases).
> For most websites, DDoS attacks are a non-issue.
It can also help with things like Google Analytics bot spam, drive-by vulnerability scans against certain web servers or Wordpress, etc. It's not just a IP blacklist but does some degree of traffic analysis.
And all of that is available for free or cheap. It's very difficult to do all that yourself as a small-biz or solo web dev, even if you had full time dev-ops.
As for "the internet shouldn't be controlled by a single entity", sure, but it's always been a corporate network. Choose your nemesis: Cloudflare, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Verisign/network solutions (in the old days)... there's never been a truly free internet. At least Cloudflare is doing a darned good job of stewarding the internet.