Thanks this is really helpful, I'm planning a delicate migration to a CDN and it's a tough choice. Cloudflare just seems like "an everything machine" from their marketing website, I'm struggling to understand how I would actually use it for a monolithic website + API.
CF is capable of reverse proxying onto a v6-only backend server. I'm not very enthused by how much of the Internet is hosted behind Cloudflare, but they're certainly convenient for this exact use-case.
Interesting, this definitely positions them as a competitor to CloudFlare. But the CDN-as-full-proxy has some distinct disadvantages: every POST to CloudFront will have to make an extra round-trip to retrieve the data before returning to the user. We ditched CloudFlare because of this -- simple requests would take 500ms longer via CloudFlare. Presumably CloudFront will run into the same issues...
CDN and Reverse Proxy are Cloudflare's bread and butter really, WAF came later. The issue is that those technologies are rather invisible to most users when they are working correctly.
Keep in mind how Cloudflare makes most of their money: They sell a web proxy service with security and performance features including a CDN. Cloudflare's interests are furthered by improving that service in ways that help its customers. Keeping the Web Archive healthily stocked with content is aligned with their long term revenue growth.
> While Cloudflare is a big player, pretty much every service today has some form of third party MITM machine - things like Fastly, Akamai, Google Cloud Load Balancer and CloudFront all provide reverse proxy capabilities on the same level as Cloudflare.
the normal way to do this is to run your static content through CDN's and allow your dynamic content to hit origin.
you're not saved from DDoS of course, but you'd be surprised at how much cookies for static content can cost you in CDN costs; usually people use a separate domain.
I agree with you and it's a mental model that Cloudflare isn't a swiss-army knife CDN.. They optimize for fronting web services (And do that very very well).
I use them on my personal site - but on the corporate side where we need TCP acceleration, edge serving of binary resources and POP presence in China - we turn back to crusty ole Akamai.
Cloudflare is a CDN with extra bells and whistles.
A CDN is a way to off-load the bulk of the requests to your webserver by moving the content as close as possible to your end-users, thus reducing the number of hops required to get to the content, which in return increases end-user satisfaction with your product due to a decrease in page load time.
The theory is that if a user gets a snappy service they are more willing to spend their money, and so e-commerce sites and sites that tend to monetize their users in some way find benefits in using services like these.
I hope that explains it adequately. To label cloudflare a mere CDN is a dis-service to them but for explanation purposes it might as well be, I'm sure someone from CloudFlare is able to give a much better explanation of just why their offering is not just an ordinary CDN but goes much further than that.
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