3 ms·

Cloudflare Data Platform

83 points by jonbaer 1y ago

OutOfHere 1y ago
I don't know about other people, but I would not want to use a platform by a firm that subjects some of its users to extortion. Even if there wasn't extortion, I'd still prefer open source.
- logicallee 1y ago
  Could you elaborate? What are you referring to?
  - victorbjorklund 1y ago
    Probably things like this: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
    - SilverElfin 1y ago
      Insane story. And a huge red flag if true. Shutting down a customer’s live websites because they’re considering a competitor is unacceptable.
      - ayhanfuat 1y ago
        I would say it was more nuanced than that. Here's the discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808
    - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      Honestly yeah I also used to think about it but this was so one off of an instant and another reason why something like this happened was that there was some massive miscommunication aspects from both cloudflare and the website iirc. Yes the fault is on cf but I am pretty sure that out of all the cases of things happening on all platforms, cf has one of the lowest rates. One also has to think through that cf has a anycast platform and the website in question was a gambling platform which no matter what they say, is still a tangible risk and can cause their ip's banned. Honestly I appreciate the concern but it isn't something to be worried about tbh, Firstly this thing happened when like the company was making millions running all on cf, and mistakes happen and honestly this is the only mistake that I hear of cf except of 1000's of things in aws, gcloud etc. Miscommunication was the wrong thing here but nobody is prepared for it and I believe that cf has learnt from the instance & could be forgiven. Also they are the cheapest in the business if you use their cf workers and s3 etc., now this data platform. I guess one can have the domain be hosted somewhere else except cf too if they are this worried and things would still work iirc Another idea could be redirection of domains if they want the domain to be hosted by cf but also want some safety net. Always make some backups and be happy to migrate, Backups should be made in all platforms and these things happen everywhere don't they. Not even sure why I am shilling cf this hard but I just hate when people bring this one instance to move people away from cf.. Like tell me the alternatives dude? tell me something so simple and cheap that I can't worry about high bills like in aws or anything while having massive scale and latency using cf workers Servers are good but depending on the context y'know. If you are writing some javascript, cf workers can be insanely good for it atleast in my use cases. Cf workers also has containers which is a very interesting thing that I am looking forward to learning more about tbh.
      - OutOfHere 1y ago
        I don't know why people are so afraid of deploying open source software on their own. It literally can do most things that the major platform services can do. With AI assistance, it's not hard to deploy or to scale. When you use a company like CF, you are opening the door to a permanent lock-in, to potential compromise of all your customer data by the government, and to extortion, all of which are avoidable.
    - throwaway642012 1y ago
      There are many valid criticisms of Cloudflare but this article ain’t it. That article has been debunked already. OP wanted to run an online casino and wanted to circumvent Cloudflare policies. Cloudflare simply asked them to show up with their own IP and instead OP went on to slander them.
      - OutOfHere 1y ago
        No, it hasn't. There is no excuse for what Cloudflare did which is to suddenly ask a seemingly locked-in customer for a lot more money under the threat of canceling them.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Cloudflare sells DDoS protection. Including to botnet operators that sell DDoS services. That's seems a bit self-serving to me.
- gethly 1y ago
  cloudflare is definitely one of those companies that is in most people's blind spot. no one ever asks how a company that has astronomical operational costs is able to thrive with free services which themselves break encryption of online communication...it's totally a tin foil hat time, but nobody cares as long as they get their free sh**
  - OutOfHere 1y ago
    They probably have a fat pipe straight to NSA's datacenter in Utah, with data flowing out and money flowing in.
    - ahofmann 1y ago
      Either this, or the other big cloud providers have astronomical margins. One could look at the financial reports of this companies to find out...
  - mcintyre1994 1y ago
    I suspect a lot of people ask that, because a while ago they wrote a blog post explaining why having a large free tier is important to their business model: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/
tedk-42 1y ago
A data lake is a sensible business move to compliment their R2 object store. For the longest time, you can query S3 in AWS through a range of their services and more (Athena being the most obvious). They mention edge compute as a feature as well which is an interesting use case but from what I've seen in my day-to-day it's mostly teams in analytics/business intelligence that require SQL/UI for their queries in a mostly locked down environment as opposed to on the edge. Edit: I have seen people discuss at work exposing our data lake in such a way that the backend apps can query it directly for data rather than rely on sync mechanisms to a postgres / other DB
68433223080787 1y ago
[flagged]
- simianparrot 1y ago
  Remember to flag'em. There's been too much of this obvious marketing spam here lately.
- akmittal 1y ago
  I personally did not see too many posts about cloudflare. Even if there were those did not get upvoted. Not sure what the issue is

83 points by jonbaer 1y ago

I don't know about other people, but I would not want to use a platform by a firm that subjects some of its users to extortion. Even if there wasn't extortion, I'd still prefer open source.

logicallee 1y ago
Could you elaborate? What are you referring to?
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
  Probably things like this: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
  - SilverElfin 1y ago
    Insane story. And a huge red flag if true. Shutting down a customer’s live websites because they’re considering a competitor is unacceptable.
    - ayhanfuat 1y ago
      I would say it was more nuanced than that. Here's the discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    Honestly yeah I also used to think about it but this was so one off of an instant and another reason why something like this happened was that there was some massive miscommunication aspects from both cloudflare and the website iirc. Yes the fault is on cf but I am pretty sure that out of all the cases of things happening on all platforms, cf has one of the lowest rates. One also has to think through that cf has a anycast platform and the website in question was a gambling platform which no matter what they say, is still a tangible risk and can cause their ip's banned. Honestly I appreciate the concern but it isn't something to be worried about tbh, Firstly this thing happened when like the company was making millions running all on cf, and mistakes happen and honestly this is the only mistake that I hear of cf except of 1000's of things in aws, gcloud etc. Miscommunication was the wrong thing here but nobody is prepared for it and I believe that cf has learnt from the instance & could be forgiven. Also they are the cheapest in the business if you use their cf workers and s3 etc., now this data platform. I guess one can have the domain be hosted somewhere else except cf too if they are this worried and things would still work iirc Another idea could be redirection of domains if they want the domain to be hosted by cf but also want some safety net. Always make some backups and be happy to migrate, Backups should be made in all platforms and these things happen everywhere don't they. Not even sure why I am shilling cf this hard but I just hate when people bring this one instance to move people away from cf.. Like tell me the alternatives dude? tell me something so simple and cheap that I can't worry about high bills like in aws or anything while having massive scale and latency using cf workers Servers are good but depending on the context y'know. If you are writing some javascript, cf workers can be insanely good for it atleast in my use cases. Cf workers also has containers which is a very interesting thing that I am looking forward to learning more about tbh.
    - OutOfHere 1y ago
      I don't know why people are so afraid of deploying open source software on their own. It literally can do most things that the major platform services can do. With AI assistance, it's not hard to deploy or to scale. When you use a company like CF, you are opening the door to a permanent lock-in, to potential compromise of all your customer data by the government, and to extortion, all of which are avoidable.
  - throwaway642012 1y ago
    There are many valid criticisms of Cloudflare but this article ain’t it. That article has been debunked already. OP wanted to run an online casino and wanted to circumvent Cloudflare policies. Cloudflare simply asked them to show up with their own IP and instead OP went on to slander them.
    - OutOfHere 1y ago
      No, it hasn't. There is no excuse for what Cloudflare did which is to suddenly ask a seemingly locked-in customer for a lot more money under the threat of canceling them.
- fragmede 1y ago
  Cloudflare sells DDoS protection. Including to botnet operators that sell DDoS services. That's seems a bit self-serving to me.
gethly 1y ago
cloudflare is definitely one of those companies that is in most people's blind spot. no one ever asks how a company that has astronomical operational costs is able to thrive with free services which themselves break encryption of online communication...it's totally a tin foil hat time, but nobody cares as long as they get their free sh**
- OutOfHere 1y ago
  They probably have a fat pipe straight to NSA's datacenter in Utah, with data flowing out and money flowing in.
  - ahofmann 1y ago
    Either this, or the other big cloud providers have astronomical margins. One could look at the financial reports of this companies to find out...
- mcintyre1994 1y ago
  I suspect a lot of people ask that, because a while ago they wrote a blog post explaining why having a large free tier is important to their business model: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/

tedk-42 1y ago

A data lake is a sensible business move to compliment their R2 object store. For the longest time, you can query S3 in AWS through a range of their services and more (Athena being the most obvious). They mention edge compute as a feature as well which is an interesting use case but from what I've seen in my day-to-day it's mostly teams in analytics/business intelligence that require SQL/UI for their queries in a mostly locked down environment as opposed to on the edge. Edit: I have seen people discuss at work exposing our data lake in such a way that the backend apps can query it directly for data rather than rely on sync mechanisms to a postgres / other DB

68433223080787 1y ago

[flagged]

simianparrot 1y ago
Remember to flag'em. There's been too much of this obvious marketing spam here lately.
akmittal 1y ago
I personally did not see too many posts about cloudflare. Even if there were those did not get upvoted. Not sure what the issue is