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Just wanted to also reiterate how thankful I am that you took your time to let us know. It speaks volumes.

by Akuehne 4y ago

taf2 4y ago
Agreed- couldn’t figure out what was going on… finally checked here and - ah now I can sleep
- Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
  Cloudflare going down is one of the things which keeps me awake, My main complaint about Cloudflare is that they are very good at everything they offer that we've become reliant on them for everything.
  - jimmygrapes 4y ago
    "do no evil" springs to mind -- once burned, etc.
    - Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
      Yeah, What's up with the competition to Cloudflare? What's the real barrier for entry? It's not infrastructure anymore, As there is a new PaaS startup every week offering distributed hosting and So why bundling in DNS, DDOS detection+mitigation, cloud workers... with it is so hard?
      - subvarad 4y ago
        There are many noteworthy players - Akamai, Fastly etc., and Edge plaoviders like ourselves (Zycada) who complement top CDNs like Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly.
        Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
        The main difference between Cloudflare and the others mentioned is the price; One can start with CF for a side project for free and continue to use it free till it becomes a viable startup. Others at best offer a limited trial plan, But most are just 'Speak to expert/ Contact us' for pricing which means haggling with a sales rep while we can just build things. Even the paid plans of CF is reasonable when compared with others with better features.
      - jgrahamc 4y ago
        It's hard at scale.
        Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
        Isn't everything harder at scale? That's not a barrier for entry though.
        andrewnyr 4y ago
        for a global cdn... it quite literally is
        Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
        Point taken, For a Global CDN - scale is the point of entry.
        Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
        Building a CDN absolutely is hard to do at scale. You can't build a Cloudflare competitor in AWS/Azure/Linode/DO/etc. You need your own data centers. Multiple of them across the country, ideally around the world if you want to serve the whole world. This is insanely hard.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - richdougherty 4y ago
        This is just my take, but Cloudflare looks to be building a "moat" to make entry hard. This is built around two things: 1. economies of scale, 2. a network effect. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale As Cloudflare gets bigger, they can provide services more cheaply. This is because (a) they can more fully utilise their data centres and other physical capital investments, (b) they can divide their fixed software costs over more users and (c) they get process efficiencies and discounts with scale. A new entrant will struggle to match cost unless they're able to obtain similar scale. The bigger Cloudflare gets, the bigger the scale that a new entrant needs to hit before they can match them on cost. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect Second they're aiming to build a network effect through having huge number of locations. The more locations, the more appealing to new customers as they can be close to more users. A competitor will have to build a similar number of locations to match Cloudflare's proposition. A new entrant cannot provide as much value, and therefore cannot charge as high a price, without building a similar sized network. This again requires the entrant to invest heavily before they can charge a similar price. - The combination of these two things mean that when Cloudflare is operating at a large scale with a large network it can offer a more valuable service (and charge a higher price) than a new entrant, and earn more profit because it can operate at a lower cost. Also, Cloudflare has the option of lowering its price and still being profitable due to lower costs at its scale, so it can deter entrants from trying to compete by the threat of being able to lower prices below what is profitable for new entrants. The only players who can compete may be those who already have comparable size - Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, CDNs, etc, since they will already have addressed the issues of scale and network effects. However, they may not want to cannibalise their existing markets. It will be hard for other new entrants to compete.
  - brightball 4y ago
    Happens to everybody sometime. AWS seemed to have a major outage a couple of times a year for a while there.
    - subvarad 4y ago
      Exactly but the likelihood of two networks going down at the same time is close to Zero. Check out: https://www.cdnreserve.com/ https://www.cdnreserve.com/ We rolled it out to complement top CDNs.
    - Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
      True, They're usually due to issues with BGP routes. It's common to see CF being the DNS/CDN for applications across AWS, GCP, Azure etc. So perhaps CF being down affects more applications than individual cloud platforms?

Just wanted to also reiterate how thankful I am that you took your time to let us know. It speaks volumes.

taf2 4y ago

Agreed- couldn’t figure out what was going on… finally checked here and - ah now I can sleep

Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
Cloudflare going down is one of the things which keeps me awake, My main complaint about Cloudflare is that they are very good at everything they offer that we've become reliant on them for everything.
- jimmygrapes 4y ago
  "do no evil" springs to mind -- once burned, etc.
  - Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
    Yeah, What's up with the competition to Cloudflare? What's the real barrier for entry? It's not infrastructure anymore, As there is a new PaaS startup every week offering distributed hosting and So why bundling in DNS, DDOS detection+mitigation, cloud workers... with it is so hard?
    - subvarad 4y ago
      There are many noteworthy players - Akamai, Fastly etc., and Edge plaoviders like ourselves (Zycada) who complement top CDNs like Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly.
      - Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
        The main difference between Cloudflare and the others mentioned is the price; One can start with CF for a side project for free and continue to use it free till it becomes a viable startup. Others at best offer a limited trial plan, But most are just 'Speak to expert/ Contact us' for pricing which means haggling with a sales rep while we can just build things. Even the paid plans of CF is reasonable when compared with others with better features.
    - jgrahamc 4y ago
      It's hard at scale.
      - Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
        Isn't everything harder at scale? That's not a barrier for entry though.
        andrewnyr 4y ago
        for a global cdn... it quite literally is
        Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
        Point taken, For a Global CDN - scale is the point of entry.
        Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
        Building a CDN absolutely is hard to do at scale. You can't build a Cloudflare competitor in AWS/Azure/Linode/DO/etc. You need your own data centers. Multiple of them across the country, ideally around the world if you want to serve the whole world. This is insanely hard.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - richdougherty 4y ago
      This is just my take, but Cloudflare looks to be building a "moat" to make entry hard. This is built around two things: 1. economies of scale, 2. a network effect. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale As Cloudflare gets bigger, they can provide services more cheaply. This is because (a) they can more fully utilise their data centres and other physical capital investments, (b) they can divide their fixed software costs over more users and (c) they get process efficiencies and discounts with scale. A new entrant will struggle to match cost unless they're able to obtain similar scale. The bigger Cloudflare gets, the bigger the scale that a new entrant needs to hit before they can match them on cost. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect Second they're aiming to build a network effect through having huge number of locations. The more locations, the more appealing to new customers as they can be close to more users. A competitor will have to build a similar number of locations to match Cloudflare's proposition. A new entrant cannot provide as much value, and therefore cannot charge as high a price, without building a similar sized network. This again requires the entrant to invest heavily before they can charge a similar price. - The combination of these two things mean that when Cloudflare is operating at a large scale with a large network it can offer a more valuable service (and charge a higher price) than a new entrant, and earn more profit because it can operate at a lower cost. Also, Cloudflare has the option of lowering its price and still being profitable due to lower costs at its scale, so it can deter entrants from trying to compete by the threat of being able to lower prices below what is profitable for new entrants. The only players who can compete may be those who already have comparable size - Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, CDNs, etc, since they will already have addressed the issues of scale and network effects. However, they may not want to cannibalise their existing markets. It will be hard for other new entrants to compete.
- brightball 4y ago
  Happens to everybody sometime. AWS seemed to have a major outage a couple of times a year for a while there.
  - subvarad 4y ago
    Exactly but the likelihood of two networks going down at the same time is close to Zero. Check out: https://www.cdnreserve.com/ https://www.cdnreserve.com/ We rolled it out to complement top CDNs.
  - Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
    True, They're usually due to issues with BGP routes. It's common to see CF being the DNS/CDN for applications across AWS, GCP, Azure etc. So perhaps CF being down affects more applications than individual cloud platforms?