4 ms·
Show HN: Just Fucking Use Cloudflare – A satirical guide to the CF stack
Inspired by the recent justfuckingusetailwind.com, I built a similar "love letter" to the Cloudflare ecosystem.
I find myself reaching for Workers, R2, D1, and KV for almost every project lately, so I wanted to capture that sentiment in a single, slightly over-the-top page.
It’s a simple side project, but the stack is:
- Vite + TypeScript
- Biome + Ultracite
- Deployed (obviously) on Cloudflare
First draft in Claude, the copy was drafted with Grok to get that specific tone, then I used Google's AI Studio to accelerate the build with touch up's in Cursor.
Link: https://justfuckingusecloudflare.com https://justfuckingusecloudflare.com
Repo: https://github.com/mynameistito/justfuckingusecloudflare https://github.com/mynameistito/justfuckingusecloudflare
Curious to hear everyone's thoughts on the CF stack vs alternatives and more traditional deployments.
- sastraxi 9mo agoI find their SQL database’s latency to be absolutely unusable, though I haven’t tried in a few months. Otherwise I agree, great free tiers for what I’ve used it for.
- tajd 9mo agoYeah agree, the devex has room for improvement as well. I use it perfectly fine for simpler apps but it could be better. Big love for cloudflare though - all my apps are hosted with it. Their components and generous free tier have been able to let me ship so many random things.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- moralestapia 9mo agoImagine the CEO of CloudFlare coming to the thread to tell you he doesn't like the free marketing. As dumb as it sounds, I've witnessed a similar thing not long ago, lol. (Different company, not CloudFlare. I really like CF.)
- breckenedge 9mo agoThis? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313750
- MyNameIsTito 9mo agoThe CF CTO - Dane Knetch gave it a RT on X (posted there too)
- sroerick 9mo agoI'm on POOH stack. htmx, OCAML, OpenBSD, and Postgres
- breckenedge 9mo agoFour years ago I was a reluctant maintainer of a Cloudflare workers setup. At the time, my thoughts were “Cloudflare is not my app, yet because of these workers, it’s performing business logic, which doesn’t feel right. I want Cloudflare to just be a dumb shield preventing DDOS attacks.” Now that I’ve used it for a few years professionally, my opinions are much more nuanced and hard to put into words. Cloudflare’s products are mostly pretty good, and the cost savings are very attractive. You just have to be willing to work at their level.
- tonyhart7 9mo agoYeah the only problem for me that Cloudflare is so dominant and Tech x monopoly is not a good combination also they are becoming cloud service provider that can really threaten many big player because from bandwidth alone is real game changer
- sroerick 9mo agoThey really are quite spooky
- kankerlijer 9mo agoWell, I'd be interested to hear what some of those nuances are, personally. I primarily work in highly regulated industries and air gapped environments. I probably bother to do things that are considered a bother by most, like stick with k8s for most deployment scenarios. I play with CF on my home network and I just don't get it outside of ddos protection and fast delivery. It seems like a nightmare to maintain in the long run. What am I missing?
- alilikestech 9mo agoi prefer using Cloudflare as a WAF and CDN and run my stuff on prem on my Homelab with cloudflared facilitating internet pass through
- MyNameIsTito 9mo agoThat's cool, whatcha got cooking in ya Homelab? I also utilse Zero Trust for a few projects and panels for some servers
- fatih-erikli-cg 9mo ago[dead]
- grekowalski 9mo agoOr choose one dedicated server and just pay ten times less for everything.
- nivekkevin 9mo agowhat's generally the go-to these days for non server-less?
- Bombthecat 9mo agoHetzner?
- Incipient 9mo agoWe use vultr. So far all is good. May be a few bucks a month more, but very minor in the grand scheme of things.
- MyNameIsTito 9mo agoYes that is possible too! We utilse VPS's for some projects and even dedicated servers for a side project I help with.
- ysleepy 9mo agoHow about no. Cloudflare is a cancer interjecting itself into all sorts of communication I'd rather have directly with the other party, like my bank, email, blogs, health providers etc. Gatekeeping the broader internet from people in poorer countries, people using VPNs etc. I predict they will be the first pushing DRM blobs instead of html/js and killing the open web.
- anonym29 9mo ago+1 Obligatory resource: https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare Any single US entity trying to MITM such large swatches of global internet traffic is inherently dangerous to global freedom. they're a single point of failure for national security letters and secret gag orders that can compel them to perform targeted censorship, backdoor all sorts of software via HTTP distribution channels, assist in US disinformation operations by rewriting third party content, etc. They could be logging literally every plaintext HTTP request and response passing through their servers and leaving it wide open in some noSQL database for hackers to go steal from someday - users have no way to trust that Cloudflare is even competently qualified to protect what they collect, and there's nothing stopping Cloudflare from blatantly lying about what they collect. This wouldn't be as big of an issue if they weren't collecting your social security / national insurance number, name, age, date of birth, address, contact information, credit card details, usernames, passwords, and every other piece of data under the sun on sites that sit behind CF, including government websites and websites that function more or less as public utilities. Cloudflare poses an impossible to overstate threat to your right to privacy, your right to freedom of speech, to democracy itself, to say nothing of the threat they pose to the free and open web. They are very nearly as large of a stain on what was arguably one of the crowning accomplishments of the human race (the internet) as the largest evil corporations on the planet - Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook), etc.
- HotGarbage 9mo agoGet out of here with this slop.
- mgaunard 9mo agoMy understanding is that S3 egress is only a problem if you need to take data out of AWS, which you can simply avoid by having some kind of dedicated AWS direct connect or some such to route the traffic yourself?
- apayan 9mo agoConnecting to an AWS egress point for direct connect reduces the egress price (about half) but doesn't eliminate it. It also costs thousands of dollars a month just to have the connection, so it's not great for small operations. :-/
- mgaunard 9mo agoTo my knowledge direct connect is a fixed cost, as is running your own dedicated infrastructure, so you don't pay for bandwidth.
- apayan 9mo agoI just pulled the DirectConnect prices from the AWS API, and I think there is still a per/GB charge. Here's a description of a random direct connect point in Amsterdam (Equinix AM3). https://gist.github.com/arashpayan/a91c46c3787ac610e7884b77b1054a61 https://gist.github.com/arashpayan/a91c46c3787ac610e7884b77b... If I'm reading the description correctly, egress from there is 2 cents/GB, while the regular price for egress (less than 10 TB) from eu-south-1 is 9 cents/GB.
- mgaunard 9mo agoThat's Milan to Amsterdam though. Aren't there some mechanisms to have a handoff as close to Milan as possible? I was pretty sure there was a way to have something that's just a fixed cost, maybe with a partner third party service.
- apayan 9mo agoYeah, you're right. A direct connect in Milan at Equinix ML2 is $2.48/port-hour. > "description": "$2.48 per connected HC-10G port-hour (or partial hour) (EU (Milan), Equinix ML2, Milano, Italy)" https://gist.github.com/arashpayan/b115e834191fbc89ac1bc1cdcbc61b71 https://gist.github.com/arashpayan/b115e834191fbc89ac1bc1cdc...
- parliament32 9mo agoOr you could just, ya know, rent a $5/mo VPS? For "your shitty todo app" it will work fine, has predictable scaling, and a built-in hard spend cap. Except you're not locked in to one particular "corporate overlord", because you can run it on literally thousands of different providers.
- sshine 9mo agoWhile this strategy scales to a few thousands of requests per second simply by replacing the VPS by a beefier dedicated box, using the exact same technology and skills, I suspect the allure is dreams of hyperscaling.
- ripped_britches 9mo agoI love Cloudflare, I just wish they did container stuff for when I need it.
- chipgap98 9mo agoThey do offer containers now
- MyNameIsTito 9mo agoThey do containers now! Unless it's a specific thing within containers you need to accomplish the stuff you want it to do.
- h27 9mo agoI love Cloudflare. A lot. But I don't love that they refuse to address the fact their cloud has a single fault zone. Customers can not, no matter how hard they try, build highly available services using Cloudflare. They are quite proud of it too if you read the smugness in their blogs about having just 1 region: Earth... Yet they keep having global outages. I can no longer recommend them.
- MyNameIsTito 9mo agoWhat do you use instead? and have you completely migrated off CF?
- viraptor 9mo agoCF is the internet cancer right now and one day they'll start the squeeze. Just go with someone else unless you want that future. There are other providers for DDoS protection (as a bonus they're not known for protecting criminals themselves). There are also cloud providers for various services, or you can go with VPS/dedicated. On a technical level, their support is really bad. They want you to do all the debugging and data collection like they have no access to anything - until you start escalating. I experienced that multiple times.
- 000ooo000 9mo ago"Just fucking x" is so incredibly lame, only ever regurgitated by the biggest clowns of the industry who need the mental bumpers of this simplistic approach to software development. Can you imagine how 'real' engineers would look having equivalently teenage websites about things like concrete makeup? You embarrass us.
- piva00 9mo agoI fucking hate that Cloudflare has taken over, their captcha is broken for me on my main browser for years. I cannot get past it, I click the checkbox, the page reloads and presents the captcha again. Reported as feedback hundreds of times by this point, nothing changed, cannot find out if it's some combination of extensions within my browser. The only way is to fire Chrome (which I hate using) to access some sites when it's strictly needed.
- kordlessagain 9mo agoFuck Cloudflare.