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IMHO Cloudflare ensures decentralization of the Internet: It provides an alternative to AWS, Azure, and GCE which gives your little personal selfhosting box or
by ocdtrekkie 5mo ago
IMHO Cloudflare ensures decentralization of the Internet: It provides an alternative to AWS, Azure, and GCE which gives your little personal selfhosting box or small VPS the same level of protection the big providers have. And generally, anything you have either hosted on or proxied by Cloudflare, can be pretty trivially moved to another provider. Whereas things built on top of AWS, Azure, and GCE services tend to be pretty stuck there.
Cloudflare has some big misses in it's history, like deciding to takedown a social media site for sex workers while defending a decision to provide services to Nazis at length, but in comparison to the alternatives it makes more decentralization practical than might be otherwise.
- ipaddr 5mo agoCloudflare ensures decentralization How by taking out 25% of the internet when they go down?
- ocdtrekkie 5mo agoHave you ever seen a us-east-1 outage? Or when Exchange Online fails... weekly or so? There's a lot of huge clouds that are load-bearing for the Internet. Cloudflare is the one you can at least circumvent easily.
- gonzalohm 5mo agoThat's not true. Read about all the drama happening in Spain when an entity (the soccer league) decides to block all the Cloudfare IPs. You are stuck with no access to most websites behind Cloudfare, and that's a lot of them
- ocdtrekkie 5mo agoHow does this differ if Spain decided to block AWS IPs?
- gonzalohm 5mo agoIt doesn't, it's the same problem. But at least AWS provides more services. Cloudfare is just an extra layer to route traffic
- yencabulator 5mo agoCloudflare does a lot more these days. You can run a JS app in Workers and any Linux app in a container. You can have them host your database and object storage.
- ipaddr 5mo agoGreat and I heard they offer haircuts at a discount. But they still block 25% of internet traffic