Oxy is Cloudflare's Rust-based next generation proxy framework (2023)

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-oxy/

by Garbage • 9 months ago

192 88 9 months ago

blog.cloudflare.com

jnord• 9 months ago

(2023)

pclmulqdq• 9 months ago

Interesting. No mention of kernel bypass, which Cloudflare was also discussing in 2023-2024.

wmf4• 9 months ago

Outside of HPC/HFT most people will never need kernel bypass. If you just got off Nginx you probably have years of optimizations left to do. (Username checks out though.)

majke• 9 months ago

There should be a political party for people who use opcode mnemonics as their nicknames or domain names.

nwellinghoff• 9 months ago

So why is this surfacing again now and why not a up to date article on Oxy? Which sounds very useful btw.

wmf4• 9 months ago

There are always people who haven't heard about stuff. https://xkcd.com/1053/

nchmy• 9 months ago

Surely you're not saying that everyone should just start posting all of cloudflare's blog posts? Let alone all blog posts on the net.

So, what's the threshold for what should be shared, given that most people don't know most thing things...?

atonse• 9 months ago

They also could forget about it. I bet I've probably seen Oxy in some cloudflare post from years ago (maybe even from a launch week or something) but it never resonated.

But I might have encountered this problem or am about to, and such a post might resonate more.

It is like advertising in a way. But for knowledge. As long as people upvote it, it's resonating.

mxxx• 9 months ago

unfortunate name

BoorishBears2• 9 months ago

ah, the duality of man.

mattclarkdotnet• 9 months ago

Only in America

yeahforsureman• 9 months ago

Unfortunately not (only)

leosanchez2• 9 months ago

What does it mean ?

stanac• 9 months ago

Short for oxycodone, a drug abused by addicts.

system2• 9 months ago

They were too nerdy to think that way (or even know the street drug names).

isodev2• 9 months ago

I know it because of movies and books... so can we trust a "next generation proxy framework" by people who don't go out, don't read and don't watch culture things? The name is similar in other languages too..

isodev2• 9 months ago

Yup, here I am on the other side of the world and that was the first thing it reminds me of. The link to Rust is... remote, and I have to think a lot :D

linsomniac5• 9 months ago

I spent some time on Friday trying out Cloudflare tunnel and boy was it a bad experience. The big killer was that the tunnel endpoint they gave me had an IPv6-only endpoint that I'm not sure was even valid. None of my devices could connect to it, including macbook, phone, linux, AWS instance...

On top of that I keep running into unexpected roadblocks with Cloudflare, like when I was trying to set up the tunnel they required me to set up a dedicated domain, you can't set up a subdomain of an existing domain. Probably fine if you are rolling it out as a production service, but for just testing it to make sure it even works (see IPv6 comments above), I just wanted to set it up as a subdomain.

watermelon0• 9 months ago

Haven't used Cloudflare in a while, but in the past you needed $200/month Business plan to be able to use subdomains of an existing domain with DNS hosted elsewhere.

h33t-l4x0r2• 9 months ago

Nah, I'm free tier. I register domains through them and I think I pay around $10/month for R2 storage. All kinds of other freebies come on that tier, D1 databases (sqlite), Workers (think Lambda)

csomar2• 9 months ago

That really sums up the cloudflare experience and this is from someone heavily invested in their workers platform. They have lots of products and keep pumping more but except for DNS, most of them are half assed with weak maintenance/support.

CuriouslyC2• 9 months ago

That's not a fair take. I will give Cloudflare a lot of shit for some of their products, but some of their products are 100% best in class. For instance, R2 is just better than S3, and KV is better than AWS/GCP options. The pricing is better, it's multi-region by default and there's less ops overhead.

Jnr• 9 months ago

It was a smooth experience for me. Just start the cloudflared container with the provided key in the environment and you are done. I also don't have ipv6 but it is not required and if I remember correctly I did not have to specify any endpoints, just the key.

h33t-l4x0r2• 9 months ago

Works great for me, 5 subdomains coming to various ports on my dev pc for whatever project I'm testing (8000 for laravel, 3000 for nextjs). Way better than ngrok.

stingraycharles3• 9 months ago

We're using Cloudflare Zero Trust quite extensively, and I find them quite easy to use. Works perfectly from AWS as well, all their endpoints have both IPv4 and IPv6 IPs.

linsomniac5• 9 months ago

Maybe the tunnel they provisioned for me was just broken, because:

    $ host -t A 9c8855f1-e47f-47bf-9e0e-66938be0f076.cfargotunnel.com
    9c8855f1-e47f-47bf-9e0e-66938be0f076.cfargotunnel.com has no A record
    $ host -t AAAA 9c8855f1-e47f-47bf-9e0e-66938be0f076.cfargotunnel.com
    9c8855f1-e47f-47bf-9e0e-66938be0f076.cfargotunnel.com has IPv6 address fd10:aec2:5dae::
    $ telnet -6 9c8855f1-e47f-47bf-9e0e-66938be0f076.cfargotunnel.com 443
    Trying fd10:aec2:5dae::...
    telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection timed out

I got the cloudflared running fairly easily (though their Debian package repo seemed broken and they didn't have an option listed on the setup page for downloading just the binary, I was able to find it after some searching). That part went smoothly, I just couldn't connect to the tunnel they provisioned.

pyeri2• 9 months ago

localtunnel[1] is one good option, at least for now.

[1] https://localtunnel.github.io/www/

mrasong• 9 months ago

Gotta say, this is amazing, exactly what I needed.

letmetweakit• 9 months ago

I don't really get how the developer can run the project free of charge without monetization options. Does this solely rely on donors?

f311a• 9 months ago

We spent 3 days trying to properly integrate their tunnels to our internal network. I took us 3 hours to integrate tailscale.

Tunnels are poorly documented.

linsomniac5• 9 months ago

Tunnels are poorly documented.

I'd tend to agree with that, but I was able to find some youtube videos of people setting them up. It was still a little bit of a challenge though because they have moved the menus all around in the last few months, so even the most recent videos I could fine were pointing to locations that didn't exist and I had to go hunting for them.

I would have preferred to just use tailscale for this, but we are using headscale and want to make a service available to our sister company, that doesn't have e-mails in our Google Workgroup where we have the OIDC for auth, so they can't be part of our tailnet without buying them logins or setting up accounts in keycloak or similar.

noir_lord• 9 months ago

I use it with a separate docker compose project so everything lives inside that (with traefik) and it's been utterly bulletproof for years - took a little puzzling out to start with but otherwise no drama and lets me do foo-whatever.mydomain.co.uk and route publically which is fantastic for local dev stuff or where I want to test something on iphone/android easily or share it - keeps all that stuff out of my "stack" for dev projects which makes for a very fast spinup if I want to test something.

candiddevmike• 9 months ago

We were also super frustrated with Cloudflare Tunnel, especially from a developer experience and firewall perspective. So we built Tunlr to replace it: https://tunlr.dev. It's Cloudflare Tunnels but you can self-host it and provide your own domains for your internal developers to use, and it proxies over HTTP/SSE which plays nicely with firewalls.

ricardbejarano• 9 months ago

Oh like Pangolin

sklarsa• 9 months ago

I'm very surprised to see all of the negativity toward Cloudflare's usability and value here.

It's been relatively painless for me to set up tunnels secured by SSO to expose dashboards and other internal tools across my distributed team using the free plan. Yes, I need to get a little creative with my DNS records (to avoid nested subdomain restrictions), but this is not really much of a nuisance given all of the value they're giving me for free.

And after paying just a little bit ($10-20 per month), I'm getting geo-based routing through their load balancers to ensure that customers are getting the fastest connection to my infra. All with built-in failover in case a region goes down.

linsomniac5• 9 months ago

I really wanted to love Cloudflare, even invested in it a couple years ago I was so confident in their vision. But...

- They won't tell you at what point you will outgrow their $200/mo plan and have to buy their $5K+/mo plan. I've asked their support and they say "it almost never happens", but they won't say "It will never happen." HN comment threads are full of people saying they were unexpectedly called by sales saying they needed to go Enterprise.

- There are no logs available (or at least weren't 6-9 months ago) for the service I proxy through Cloudflare at the $200/mo level, you have to go with Enterprise ($5K+ I've been told) to get logs of connections.

- I set up some test certs when I was migrating, and AFAICT there is no way to remove them now. It's been a year, my "Edge Certificates" page has 2 active certs and 6 "Timed Out Validation" certs, I can't find a way to remove them.

- The tunnel issue I had on Friday trying to set up where my tunnel, more details in another comment here but apparently the endpoint they gave me was IPv6 only and not accepting traffic.

- Inability to set up a tunnel, even to test, on a subdomain. You have to dedicate a domain to it, for no good reason that I can tell.

locknitpicker3• 9 months ago

I'm very surprised to see all of the negativity toward Cloudflare's usability and value here.

As someone who uses Cloudflare at a professional level, I don't. To me each and every single service provided by Cloudflare feels somewhere between not ready for production or lacking any semblance of a product manager. Everything feels unreliable and brittle. Even the portal. I understand they are rushing to release a bunch of offerings, but this rush does surface in their offerings.

One of my pet peeves is Cloudflare's Cache API in Cloudflare Workers, and how Cloudflare's sanctioned approach to cache POST requests is to play tricks with the request, such as manipulate HTTP verb, URL, and headers, until it somehow works. It's ass-backwards. They own the caching infrastructure, they own the js runtime, they designed and are responsible for the DX, but all they choose to offer is a kludge.

Also, Cloudflare Workers are somehow deemed as customizable request pipelines, but other Cloudflare products such as Cloudflare Images service can't be used with Workers as it fails to support forwarding standard request headers.

I could go on and on, but ranting won't improve anything.

amluto• 9 months ago

Cloudflare’s whole admin console is rather incoherent. The tunnel configuration makes very little sense unless you understand the product in quite a bit of detail, and the docs don’t help. And sites, tunnels, DNS config and such are entangled in bizarre ways. Oh, and there’s console zero and one, and they seem to reroute to each other basically arbitrarily :(

It would be awesome if there was a way to view the console that actually reflected how a request routed through the system.

AbuAssar• 9 months ago

clever name

leosanchez2• 9 months ago

What does it mean ?

BoorishBears2• 9 months ago

An informal nickname for the opioid Oxycodone

drexlspivey• 9 months ago

Oxy actually means sharp or acidic in greek. Oxygen was wrongly named like that (acid former) because it was thought to be the element to give acids their sourness but later many acids without oxygen were discovered. The key turned out to be hydrogen not oxygen

koakuma-chan• 9 months ago

How does it compare to Pangora?

thayne• 9 months ago

Is it the same thing? Perhaps oxy was later renamed to pingora?

littlestymaar• 9 months ago

The linked blog post has an entire section about that:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-oxy/#relation-to

Although Pingora, another proxy server developed by us in Rust, shares some similarities with Oxy, it was intentionally designed as a separate proxy server with a different objective.

lionkor• 9 months ago

Another un-google-able (OXY as in Occidental Petroleum Corp?) name for a Rust project. We just cannot help ourselves.

jalk• 9 months ago

The article states that it's a proprietary project

dpoloncsak• 9 months ago

You google "Rust oxy proxy" and the first like 10 hits are Cloudflare's blog about it, a few HN posts.....

seems fine to me?

pyuser5832• 9 months ago

Look at the ADA language: GPS (GNAT Pro Studio) AWS (ADA Web Server) and ADA itself (American with disabilities act).

GhosT078• 9 months ago

It would work better if more people and search engines understood that Ada (language) is not an acronym.

blinkingled2• 9 months ago

Stopped reading at proprietary. Seriously why would I care tying my app to something proprietary and have no way out of it?

stingraycharles3• 9 months ago

What makes you think you can download it and use it yourself? This is just CloudFlare discussing their internal tech stack.

blinkingled2• 9 months ago

I meant the I have no interest in knowing anything about any company's internal tech stack and also no interest in tying my application to one company's internal stack. Much of it sounded like lock-in to me.

tecleandor• 9 months ago

Although Oxy is a closed, internal project, seems like they released part of it under a BSD license. Not the networking part, but a Rust library to create "production-grade systems".

https://github.com/cloudflare/foundations

talkingtab• 9 months ago

A proprietary project. I was surprised to realize how little interest I have in these things anymore. I mean genuinely surprised. I suppose I have just seen so many large-corporation-does-something in isolation projects that I make two possibly wrong assumptions.

1) It will never work 2) The article is just advertising. Jobs, products whatever.

There is a third conclusion which is worrisome. That the leadership of the organization just doesn't get it.

I'm not advocating these as correct, just wondering if other readers share my instantaneous reaction of been-there, seen-that, know-how-it-ends.

zaoui_amine• 9 months ago

Oxy sounds cool, but proprietary stuff is a hard pass for me. Just give me open-source any day.

Oxy is Cloudflare's Rust-based next generation proxy framework (2023)

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