Just Fucking Use Cloudflare | Not Hacker News!

Just Fucking Use Cloudflare | Not Hacker News!

Discussion (37 comments)

Showing 37 comments

9 days ago

1 reply

I find their SQL database’s latency to be absolutely unusable, though I haven’t tried in a few months. Otherwise I agree, great free tiers for what I’ve used it for.

9 days ago

Yeah agree, the devex has room for improvement as well. I use it perfectly fine for simpler apps but it could be better.

Big love for cloudflare though - all my apps are hosted with it. Their components and generous free tier have been able to let me ship so many random things.

9 days ago

2 replies

Imagine the CEO of CloudFlare coming to the thread to tell you he doesn't like the free marketing.

As stupid as it sounds, I've witnessed a similar thing not long ago, lol. (different company, btw)

9 days ago

The CF CTO - Dane Knetch gave it a RT on X (posted there too)

9 days ago

This? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313750

9 days ago

2 replies

Four years ago I was a reluctant maintainer of a Cloudflare workers setup. At the time, my thoughts were “Cloudflare is not my app, yet because of these workers, it’s performing business logic, which doesn’t feel right. I want Cloudflare to just be a dumb shield preventing DDOS attacks.”

Now that I’ve used it for a few years professionally, my opinions are much more nuanced and hard to put into words. Cloudflare’s products are mostly pretty good, and the cost savings are very attractive. You just have to be willing to work at their level.

9 days ago

1 reply

Yeah the only problem for me that Cloudflare is so dominant and Tech x monopoly is not a good combination

also they are becoming cloud service provider that can really threaten many big player because from bandwidth alone is real game changer

9 days ago

They really are quite spooky

9 days ago

Well, I'd be interested to hear what some of those nuances are, personally. I primarily work in highly regulated industries and air gapped environments. I probably bother to do things that are considered a bother by most, like stick with k8s for most deployment scenarios. I play with CF on my home network and I just don't get it outside of ddos protection and fast delivery. It seems like a nightmare to maintain in the long run. What am I missing?

9 days ago

1 reply

i prefer using Cloudflare as a WAF and CDN and run my stuff on prem on my Homelab with cloudflared facilitating internet pass through

9 days ago

That's cool, whatcha got cooking in ya Homelab?

I also utilse Zero Trust for a few projects and panels for some servers

9 days ago

2 replies

Or choose one dedicated server and just pay ten times less for everything.

9 days ago

2 replies

what's generally the go-to these days for non server-less?

9 days ago

We use vultr. So far all is good. May be a few bucks a month more, but very minor in the grand scheme of things.

9 days ago

Hetzner?

9 days ago

Yes that is possible too! We utilse VPS's for some projects and even dedicated servers for a side project I help with.

9 days ago

1 reply

How about no.

Cloudflare is a cancer interjecting itself into all sorts of communication I'd rather have directly with the other party, like my bank, email, blogs, health providers etc.

Gatekeeping the broader internet from people in poorer countries, people using VPNs etc.

I predict they will be the first pushing DRM blobs instead of html/js and killing the open web.

9 days ago

+1

Obligatory resource: https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare

9 days ago

1 reply

My understanding is that S3 egress is only a problem if you need to take data out of AWS, which you can simply avoid by having some kind of dedicated AWS direct connect or some such to route the traffic yourself?

9 days ago

1 reply

Connecting to an AWS egress point for direct connect reduces the egress price (about half) but doesn't eliminate it. It also costs thousands of dollars a month just to have the connection, so it's not great for small operations. :-/

8 days ago

1 reply

To my knowledge direct connect is a fixed cost, as is running your own dedicated infrastructure, so you don't pay for bandwidth.

8 days ago

1 reply

I just pulled the DirectConnect prices from the AWS API, and I think there is still a per/GB charge. Here's a description of a random direct connect point in Amsterdam (Equinix AM3). https://gist.github.com/arashpayan/a91c46c3787ac610e7884b77b...

If I'm reading the description correctly, egress from there is 2 cents/GB, while the regular price for egress (less than 10 TB) from eu-south-1 is 9 cents/GB.

8 days ago

1 reply

That's Milan to Amsterdam though. Aren't there some mechanisms to have a handoff as close to Milan as possible?

I was pretty sure there was a way to have something that's just a fixed cost, maybe with a partner third party service.

8 days ago

Yeah, you're right. A direct connect in Milan at Equinix ML2 is $2.48/port-hour.

> "description": "$2.48 per connected HC-10G port-hour (or partial hour) (EU (Milan), Equinix ML2, Milano, Italy)"

https://gist.github.com/arashpayan/b115e834191fbc89ac1bc1cdc...

9 days ago

1 reply

[delayed]

9 days ago

While this strategy scales to a few thousands of requests per second simply by replacing the VPS by a beefier dedicated box, using the exact same technology and skills, I suspect the allure is dreams of hyperscaling.

ripped_britches

9 days ago

2 replies

I love Cloudflare, I just wish they did container stuff for when I need it.

9 days ago

They do offer containers now

9 days ago

They do containers now! Unless it's a specific thing within containers you need to accomplish the stuff you want it to do.

9 days ago

1 reply

I love Cloudflare. A lot. But I don't love that they refuse to address the fact their cloud has a single fault zone.

Customers can not, no matter how hard they try, build highly available services using Cloudflare.

They are quite proud of it too if you read the smugness in their blogs about having just 1 region: Earth... Yet they keep having global outages.

I can no longer recommend them.

9 days ago

What do you use instead? and have you completely migrated off CF?

9 days ago

"Just fucking x" is so incredibly lame, only ever regurgitated by the biggest clowns of the industry who need the mental bumpers of this simplistic approach to software development. Can you imagine how 'real' engineers would look having equivalently teenage websites about things like concrete makeup? You embarrass us.

9 days ago

CF is the internet cancer right now and one day they'll start the squeeze. Just go with someone else unless you want that future. There are other providers for DDoS protection (as a bonus they're not known for protecting criminals themselves). There are also cloud providers for various services, or you can go with VPS/dedicated.

9 days ago

I'm on HOOP stack. htmx, OCAML, OpenBSD, and Postgres

9 days ago

Get out of here with this slop.

9 days ago

I fucking hate that Cloudflare has taken over, their captcha is broken for me on my main browser for years.

I cannot get past it, I click the checkbox, the page reloads and presents the captcha again. Reported as feedback hundreds of times by this point, nothing changed, cannot find out if it's some combination of extensions within my browser. The only way is to fire Chrome (which I hate using) to access some sites when it's strictly needed.

5d ago

Fuck Cloudflare.