Ask HN: How to Compete with Cloudflare

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32997653

by jcuenod • 4 years ago

36 31 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

This week we're going to see a bunch more announcements from CF. They'll probably all have a top comment about how CF is the MITM of the internet and a single point of failure. Is this simply the future we're doomed to live in?

pramodbiligiri2• 4 years ago

Ben Thompson has analyzed in his blog how Cloudflare applied the Disruptive Innovation model - https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/. The CTO of Cloudflare sort of acknowledged that on HN back then - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28708371

There must be new niches ("value networks" as per that blog) that Cloudflare finds not worthwhile to serve. Usually they're at the lower end or the "nonconsumption" case, as described in the above blog post. That's one way to chip away at a bit of their customer base.

But it's best to just focus on customers and not imagine you're "competing with Cloudflare". Nothing to be gained by framing it that way.

dave44203• 4 years ago

But if you do that, won’t you just be another company MITMing the internet?

pramodbiligiri2• 4 years ago

Ah. Looks like I took the question fairly literally and didn’t think about the MITM part. No idea about that.

dave44203• 4 years ago

I don’t understand why people are so up in arms about Cloudflare being a MITM, but not e.g. AWS API Gateway being a MITM.

Minor49er2• 4 years ago

Probably due to the recent news about Cloudflare dropping their clients, namely Kiwi Farms, claiming things as severe as "unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike (Cloudflare has) previously seen" [1] without disclosing what exactly it was that they saw (also curiously without law enforcement getting involved). To my knowledge, AWS API Gateway has not dropped a client without adequate reason, which is why I'd imagine that Cloudflare is being specifically talked about

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/

dave44203• 4 years ago

To my knowledge, there’s never been a concerted campaign to get AWS to drop anyone as a client, whereas this seems to happen a lot to Cloudflare (Kiwi Farms being the latest example).

And anyway, if Cloudflare MITMing the internet is bad, then isn’t them having one fewer client a good thing? (Even if said ex-client would rather still be a current client.)

breaker-kind• 4 years ago

what do you mean, exactly what it was that they saw!?!? Kiwi Farms was actively sanctioning stalking, doxxing, and large-scale cyber-harassment against the trans community

WallyFunk• 4 years ago

Cloudflare is one Internet choke-point among a handful of others. But it still means content is centralized, only centralized across a handful of different providers.

johnklos3• 4 years ago

Did Amazon make a deal with Firefox to send all browsing DNS lookups to them without asking end users?

Is Amazon trying to encourage people to use DNS-over-https with specious claims that your ISP is evil, but of course Cloudflare is not, without telling us that DoH takes control away from us so we can't block ads or otherwise decide what we want to allow or block?

Is Amazon trying to push everything through just a handful of IPs so that people can't block nefarious content without also blocking legitimate content?

If everyone were on-board with what Cloudflare wants, the Internet would be re-centralized around them, and because they don't "host" (which is a special kind of bullshit) and they don't "censor", bad actors will have free reign, so long as Cloudflare is making $$$.

majke2• 4 years ago

If everyone were on-board with what Cloudflare wants, the Internet would be...

You got me lost here. Cloudflare is making money by having everyone re-centralized around it? Where is the revenue from?

bethecloud• 4 years ago

Best way to compete with Cloudflare is to use decentralized cloud storage options, that are compatible with S3, cheaper, and faster – like storj.io

jcuenod2• 4 years ago

Do you have any connection to storj?

castis• 4 years ago

It would appear that they are either the owner or have some deep relation to it.

altdataseller• 4 years ago

CloudFlare already is offering that in R2.

jacooper• 4 years ago

Cloudflare offers a lot of stuff, if you mean compete on DDOS protection, you best case is host-provider DDOA protection, which won't MITM connections.

melonrusk• 4 years ago

Gatekeeper ?

https://github.com/AltraMayor/gatekeeper/wiki

majke2• 4 years ago

This is funny. Cloudflare ddos systems were named: Gatekeeper, gatesetter, gatebot, floodgate, gatewatch :)

Ask HN: How to Compete with Cloudflare

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