CloudFront vs CloudFlare

http://cloud.dzone.com/articles/cloudfront-vs-cloudflare-we

by pajju • 14 years ago

33 40 14 years ago

cloud.dzone.com

benatkin• 14 years ago

The "We have a winner" makes me expect something substantive, but this post is just the author rambling about a tentative choice he made.

1qaz2wsx3edc• 14 years ago

I expected to see graphs and proofs. There were none. I did not read the article.

jhuckestein• 14 years ago

I love CloudFront because it automatically fetches assets from my deployed application and then caches them. I don't have to manually move stuff to S3 at all! Can CloudFlare do something similar?

eli• 14 years ago

Yes, AFAIK that's actually the only way CloudFlare works. You switch your DNS to them so that your site resolves to one of their servers and CloudFlare fetches pages and assets from your origin server.

xxdesmus4• 14 years ago

This happens automatically with CloudFlare. As your traffic passes through our service we automatically cache your files, and then on subsequent requests we will serve those caches files for you -- saving requests to your web server and saving your bandwidth.

xxdesmus4• 14 years ago

Just wanted to mention a tiny correction.

CloudFlare does have a single file purge option available: http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-single-file-purge

Single file purge is also available via our API here: http://www.cloudflare.com/docs/client-api.html#s4.5

I have mentioned this correction to the author as well.

rohamg• 14 years ago

I have set up and run cloudflare on all our sites, very happy with it. Super easy to use and gives me piece of mind.

idupree• 14 years ago

CloudFront offers HTTPS (on their domain). For low volume sites, paying for CloudFront is cheaper than paying at least $20/month for CloudFlare's HTTPS (which is also on their domain unless you pay $200/month).

Note: For this CDN HTTPS to be useful, you also need to have your main site URL have it, say, via a certificate from StartCom and a VPS or a good shared hosting site. It is a good deed to offer HTTPS even on static sites because it helps protect users' privacy (if they are using WiFi, Tor, or a sketchy ISP; which is likely). If you're distributing software or code, having some sort of signing -- HTTPS and/or GPG -- is critical to protect your users from malicious MITMs; more users are going to verify HTTPS because they don't have a choice about that one.

drakaal• 14 years ago

Article fails to mention that when CloudFlare has issues, they present Captcha's to the Google Bot, and your site gets delisted.

Also fails to mention that if the CDN gives you an IP that is the same as a Kiddy Porn site, or a pirate site that you could have Law Enforcement on your doorstep (worst case) or be delisted by Google, or blocked by NetFilters.

CloudFlare is not worth the headache. Put a squid on Azure, Rack, AWS, or Google Cloud Compute and you can have nearly the same features, for nearly the same price. And not have any of the negatives.

vegardx2• 14 years ago

You can disable the captcha-feature, as far as I know, and this is just a way to mitigate DDoS. You'd think Google would recognize that you were serving your content via a CDN, it's not like it's something new or anything.

And I'm not buying into that you could have law enforcement on your doorstep. How on earth would they tie it to you? The IP-adress is registered to CloudFlare, not you. If they have the means to find a "kiddy porn"-site, they also have the knowledge to see that it's distributed by a Content Delivery Network.

Are you really comparing a globally distributed content delivery network with a squid installed at one location on one provider?

CloudFlare might not be worth the headache, but for entirely different reasons than you have listed.

moe4• 14 years ago

You can disable the captcha-feature, as far as I know

Cloudflare displays a cloudflare-branded error page when anything goes wrong. That happens quite often, and as far as I know you can not turn that off. Oftentimes Cloudflare claims the "the backend is down" when the backend is, in fact, serving fine (which I've verified on more than one occasion).

Furthermore Cloudflare significantly degraded both latency and availability outside the US when we tested them, versus using the US origin. We've seen their error-page and 'connection refused' errors spike into the 10% range multiple times a day. Latency variance was pretty wild, with europe spiking into the 500ms(!) range.

The only other CDN I've seen similarly atrocious performance from was MaxCDN.

If you're looking for a CDN to speed your site up (duh!) then I'd recommend to go with one of the more established players. Cedexis provides a nice report that tells you which CDNs perform best in your market; http://www.cedexis.com/country-reports (I'm not affiliated with them, take their figures with a grain of salt, do your own testing on an evaluation account!)

tomclancy2• 14 years ago

>Article fails to mention that when CloudFlare has issues, they present Captcha's to the Google Bot, and your site gets delisted.

As someone who uses CloudFlare on a site that depends on Google traffic (~800K/month directly from G), this is simply not true.

citricsquid• 14 years ago

Do you mean cloudflare has had issues presenting your site to googlebot and you've not been delisted, or you use cloudflare and you've not been delisted?

fsckin• 14 years ago

I've been using CloudFlare for a site with >20m hits per month.

4TB of bandwidth saved in the last 30 days for a measly $20.

I do have small issues that arise, mostly false positives and occasional outages, but nothing too bad at all.

Compared with the costs of any other CDN and I would be looking at a rather large bill.

conradev• 14 years ago

Here is a good submission by saurik, highlighting some of the risks involved in using CloudFlare:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4235893

The blog post is titled "When 'Dumb Pipes' Get Too Smart"

stock_toaster• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, CloudFlare requiring root authority for a domain is simply a non-starter for me (or $dayjob). However, I understand why they do it -- DoS protection and ease of maintenance on their side.

I do wish they supported taking authority of a subdomain, or simply required a CNAME like many CDNs.

xxdesmus4• 14 years ago

We do have a CNAME pointing option available for paying customers.

eduardordm2• 14 years ago

Some cloudflare cons:

Cloudflare makes websites unavailable if you use services like unblock-us.com (see below)

High amount of 404 I get from cloudflare when browsing /r/pics makes me wonder who is to blame.

Cloudflare is short on locations.

Cloudfront is cheaper if you use SSL.

============

➜ ~ dig cloudflare.com

; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> cloudflare.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 3675 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION: ;cloudflare.com. IN A

;; Query time: 4847 msec ;; SERVER: 208.122.23.22#53(208.122.23.22) ;; WHEN: Sat Dec 1 18:42:43 2012 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 32

bartman• 14 years ago

Even with Unblock-Us I can reach CloudFlare just fine here (Berlin, Germany):

; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> @208.122.23.22 cloudflare.com ; (1 server found) ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 12445 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION: ;cloudflare.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION: cloudflare.com. 300 IN A 173.245.60.249 cloudflare.com. 300 IN A 173.245.60.250 cloudflare.com. 300 IN A 173.245.61.248 cloudflare.com. 300 IN A 173.245.61.249 cloudflare.com. 300 IN A 173.245.61.250

;; Query time: 61 msec ;; SERVER: 208.122.23.22#53(208.122.23.22) ;; WHEN: Sun Dec 2 01:24:29 2012 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 112

eduardordm2• 14 years ago

It looks like location influences results. Tried again at home , same results. Tried on different ec2 instances: fine on us-east, no go on sa-east-1.

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

>Cloudflare makes websites unavailable if you use services like unblock-us.com

No they don't. CloudFlare just has a security mechanism where known bad or risky IPs are presented with a captcha. However on sites with "max" security, I believe it simply blocks them entirely.

1SaltwaterC• 14 years ago

Sometimes I'm asking myself the same thing: why pay Akamai the bill when CloudFlare is so much cheaper. However, the cost of the unavailability is far greater. I guess the old saying that nobody got fired for choosing IBM still applies in a different form. It isn't bias. Just a business decision. Running CF for personal stuff though. Guess it's a proper tryout.

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

A lot of these comments seem misinformed. So, as a user of CloudFlare, let me speak:

CloudFlare takes over your domain and reverse proxies your site, to your control. They cache resources for you, selectively, to your complete control. They have some security features, like presenting captchas to dodgy IPs. The base service is completely free, albeit restrictive, but there are no bandwidth caps. They also have "apps" that provide extra features, like asynchronous JS loading, automatically adding Google Analytics to every page, email scrambling, etc. Everything is customisable - if you want, you can completely disable the security features, caching, apps, in fact, you can also disable the reverse proxying for subdomains (which of course removes all the CF benefits).

My web app, http://ponyplace.ajf.me/, has benefited greatly from being on CloudFlare, since it has relieved the burden of serving most static content from my server. It's a really great service, especially for the price. My only complaint is that SSL usage on CloudFlare is pretty pricey.

latchkey• 14 years ago

What do you mean by SSL usage? I pay $20/mo for the 'Pro' plan which is less expensive than Google AppEngine pricing (my other option).

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

But that means you can't encrypt the reverse proxy connection, IIRC.

robotkad2• 14 years ago

I wonder if everyone is missing a piece of the Cloudflare pricing puzzle.

What if they have negotiated contracts with wholesale data providers where they get a revenue share for any traffic they bring into the network? This would mean that the more sites they have hosted, the more money they bring in for their carrier (which they bill the downstream for) and in turn, the more they make.

I dont not work for Cloudflare and have never worked in the carrier/hosting biz, so this is just a theory. I am however, a very happy enterprise customer.

kalleboo• 14 years ago

I've avoided CloudFlare since it seems to good too be true, which means it probably isn't. I've been burnt in the past with overselling - if I'm not paying for the bandwidth, I'm also probably not getting it. In addition, I've seen those CloudFlare captcha pages a few times, and they look really scummy, like domain parking pages, full of ads.

xxdesmus4• 14 years ago

Paying customers can customize all the error/challenge pages with full HTML/CSS to exactly match and brand their own site.

robotkad2• 14 years ago

The other thing this article really fails to highlight is the DDOS mitigation service Cloudflare provides.

Cloudflare are disrupting a very established and lucrative industry. Companies like Prolexic charge a lot more for a lot less. Not to mention the whole "Are you currently under attack?" bullshit they pull where they charge you significantly more if you are currently a DDOS victim.

ajwinter• 14 years ago

Having used CloudFlare for multiple sites I can say it's not for everyone. In my experience it's great for sites running on shared servers and can really pick up the speed of these sites. But on some of our larger sites it had the effect of reducing the speed of our service. I think it's worth trying and using for a few weeks at the very least as your experience may very.

youngtaff• 14 years ago

The article is an Apples to Oranges comparison...

CloudFront is a content delivery network, CloudFlare is part content delivery network, part front-end optimisation service.

What CloudFlare do it optimise the content so that it loads faster e.g. by minifying JS/CSS, merging files etc. i.e. many of Steve Souders rules.

There are other services around which do much the same thing Google's PageSpeedService, Strangeloop Networks, Torbit etc.

You could perhaps achieve much the same thing using mod_pagespeed, or Aptimize etc. on your webserver and a CDN in front.

If you chose a CDN that allows you to push your dynamic pages through it e.g. Fastly, then even the HTML delivery can be speeded up in many cases (even if the CDN doesn't cache the HTML, which perhaps it could for many sites)

Real challenge that the article doesn't cover is where do CloudFront, and CloudFlare have slow performance e.g. due to peering arrangements etc. That's where multi-CDN providers (ala TurboBytes) can help

CloudFront vs CloudFlare

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