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> the internet was worse without Cloudflare Cloudflare acts as a proxy for dynamic content, thereby slowing down the internet. Their existence (and success) s

by drtgh 1y ago

> the internet was worse without Cloudflare Cloudflare acts as a proxy for dynamic content, thereby slowing down the internet. Their existence (and success) suggests a lack of infrastructure or solutions (ie. DDOS, CDN) from data centers on their own and by default, what is... sad, as if the data centers were falling asleep without adapting to the times. Soon we may have this picture: User > ISP > VPN (or proxy) > Cloudflare (proxy) > Server. Intermediaries are slowness... and in the case of Cloudflare sniffing if they want (if they manage the TLS certs).

h33t-l4x0r 1y ago
Hmm, I don't know where you get that takeaway. For me, it's an edge cache, so it speeds up the internet. It sits between user and origin, often many hops closer, and serves content cached according to rules set by customer. When you're a CF customer they send you reports on how much bandwidth origin is saving and for me, historically, it's been most of it. And they do all of it for free most of the time! There's not a lot of cloud providers that I will endorse highly, but I have only love for Cloudflare. It also keeps hackers from knowing origin's ip which is nice.
- drtgh 1y ago
  Cache of static content, ie. images, css, js or an static html, the CDNs purpose, to shorten location. At moment you serve dynamic content, you are literally redirecting the request through an intermediary server (from Cloudflare/Homologous to the original server and come back, they are acting as a proxy). This results in a slowdown of the internet. In fact, it's easy to tell when a regularly visited site has changed and put Cloudflare in between, because it takes longer to load. > It also keeps hackers from knowing origin's ip which is nice. Only if you put extra care trying to hide tracks. But certainly it keeps script kiddies from knowing origin's ip, what it is the only one nice feature. Datacenters should deal with this, but their passivity over the years seems to know no bounds.
  - cryptonym 1y ago
    CDN (can't say specifically about Cloudflare but that's true for other) may allow picking faster routes than BGP (BGP tends to optimize cost rather than perf), sometimes better compression than Origin on the path, and fast handshakes at Edge with already hot connections towards Origin. Edgecomputing can also help accelerating dynamic content.
  - h33t-l4x0r 1y ago
    I believe you that this is your experience, but this is not the case in general. Cloudflare will generally result in a faster experience for a correctly configured setup. That's kind the whole point of using them.

by drtgh 1y ago

h33t-l4x0r 1y ago

Hmm, I don't know where you get that takeaway. For me, it's an edge cache, so it speeds up the internet. It sits between user and origin, often many hops closer, and serves content cached according to rules set by customer. When you're a CF customer they send you reports on how much bandwidth origin is saving and for me, historically, it's been most of it. And they do all of it for free most of the time! There's not a lot of cloud providers that I will endorse highly, but I have only love for Cloudflare. It also keeps hackers from knowing origin's ip which is nice.

drtgh 1y ago
Cache of static content, ie. images, css, js or an static html, the CDNs purpose, to shorten location. At moment you serve dynamic content, you are literally redirecting the request through an intermediary server (from Cloudflare/Homologous to the original server and come back, they are acting as a proxy). This results in a slowdown of the internet. In fact, it's easy to tell when a regularly visited site has changed and put Cloudflare in between, because it takes longer to load. > It also keeps hackers from knowing origin's ip which is nice. Only if you put extra care trying to hide tracks. But certainly it keeps script kiddies from knowing origin's ip, what it is the only one nice feature. Datacenters should deal with this, but their passivity over the years seems to know no bounds.
- cryptonym 1y ago
  CDN (can't say specifically about Cloudflare but that's true for other) may allow picking faster routes than BGP (BGP tends to optimize cost rather than perf), sometimes better compression than Origin on the path, and fast handshakes at Edge with already hot connections towards Origin. Edgecomputing can also help accelerating dynamic content.
- h33t-l4x0r 1y ago
  I believe you that this is your experience, but this is not the case in general. Cloudflare will generally result in a faster experience for a correctly configured setup. That's kind the whole point of using them.