[HN Gopher] Cloudflare announced four major new features that co...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Cloudflare announced four major new features that could disrupt
       industries
        
       Author : heymax054
       Score  : 237 points
       Date   : 2021-10-04 14:07 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.indiehackers.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.indiehackers.com)
        
       | pixelgeek wrote:
       | Cloudflare has offered the potential to disrupt several
       | industries.
       | 
       | I actually thought that the distributed web workers was more
       | interesting but that is just my focus.
        
       | aaomidi wrote:
       | It's kinda astonishing to me that were fine with a third party
       | company terminating end to end encryption between the service
       | provider and the user. It just feels...so off to me that we've
       | normalized this.
       | 
       | Hopefully there will be new standards in the future. But for now
       | this is slightly terrifying to me.
        
         | nightpool wrote:
         | Ultimately, if you're running in a virtualized cloud
         | environment, you already trust your hosting company with your
         | website's certificates (because there's no way to stop them
         | from spying on your machine's core memory). So for most users,
         | it's not a major change to expand the trusted set from {Amazon}
         | to {Cloudflare, Amazon}. If you're the only one with root
         | access to your hardware, then more power to you. But for most
         | people I don't think it's a major change of threat model.
        
         | adventured wrote:
         | Cloudflare doesn't require terminating end to end encryption
         | between the service provider and the user.
        
           | aaomidi wrote:
           | Sure if you just use it as a dns provider.
        
         | detaro wrote:
         | Cloudflare is a service provider the site owner contracts with
         | too, so why the distinction?
        
           | aaomidi wrote:
           | Because math doesn't break like contracts do mainly.
        
             | detaro wrote:
             | that doesn't address my point, since you can say the exact
             | same about wherever the site is hosted unless you strictly
             | self-host everything, which the vast majority of sites
             | doesn't do.
        
               | aaomidi wrote:
               | To me there's a difference. Probably that terminating tls
               | is base of CFs business model.
               | 
               | Or that I'm just being illogical. No idea, just...don't
               | like it.
        
               | detaro wrote:
               | I'd argue the base is caching and load-balancing. And
               | pretty much everything that has a business model of
               | handling web traffic will need to handle HTTPS for its
               | customers nowadays.
        
               | throwaway78981 wrote:
               | You are not illogical:
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28714516
        
         | acdha wrote:
         | CDNs have existed since the 90s so everyone's had time to get
         | used to it. The part which I think you're over-weighting is
         | that this is not a third-party stranger but a third-party with
         | whom you have a legal relationship -- the use-cases for a CDN
         | require external termination, otherwise you don't rent one, and
         | the contracts commit to keeping it secure.
         | 
         | For a business, there are tons of trust relationships you
         | handle this way: you trust Microsoft not to ship a trojan in
         | Windows, Cisco/Juniper/etc. not to sniff your internal network
         | traffic, Google not to ship your Chrome session keys back home,
         | etc.
        
           | NullPrefix wrote:
           | >you trust Microsoft not to ship a trojan in Windows
           | 
           | Speak for yourself, mate.
        
             | acdha wrote:
             | a) it was one of multiple examples b) do you personally run
             | a business this way and, if so, how's that working out
             | relative to the competition? My point was simply that all
             | businesses have some parties they trust on the theory that
             | they'll sue if a contractual agreement is broken. It's too
             | expensive not to trust _someone_ when you have no
             | reasonable basis for expecting an attack and a solid legal
             | basis for compensation if they did: if you dislike
             | Microsoft, substitute Apple or Samsung, your bank, etc.
        
       | polote wrote:
       | I know that Cloudflare is always very liked on HN and the CTO
       | often comments here. I often refer to friends that Cloudflare
       | only exists thanks to HN. But Cloudflare is not (neither HN) the
       | center of the world you could have better than R2 with B2 before
       | for example.
       | 
       | And no they didnt disrupted anything. You dont disrupt anything
       | in one week actually. Has R2 had any impact on S3 business model
       | or customers so far ? Probably not.
       | 
       | Not saying Cloudflare is a bad company, I believe it is one of
       | the few (maybe with Stripe) that is able to still work as a
       | startup even though they have thousands of employees, which is
       | quite impressive. But the article is clickbait
        
         | greatsaas12 wrote:
         | I think calling it clickbait is too harsh. The right headline
         | would be: "Cloudflare announces 3 changes which have the
         | potential to disrupt 3 industries in the near/long future". So
         | it's somewhere in the middle between "totally describing what's
         | inside" vs. clickbait-y.
        
           | nuerow wrote:
           | > I think calling it clickbait is too harsh. The right
           | headline would be: "Cloudflare announces 3 changes which have
           | the potential to disrupt 3 industries in the near/long
           | future".
           | 
           | That's still quite the stretch. A pricing update to not
           | charge egress fees for object storage and some types of
           | streaming is hardly "disruptive", as is catering to the web3
           | buzzword.
           | 
           | I like Cloudflare, but these marketing blurbs start to eat
           | away the goodwill that Cloudflare's technical progresses earn
           | with their hard and quality work.
        
             | lozenge wrote:
             | Note, the author isn't affiliated with Cloudflare. It's not
             | a marketing blurb, this is how people actually talk in SV
             | apparently ;)
        
               | greatsaas12 wrote:
               | Doubt there's an affiliation. The whole article is
               | written from a perspective of how founders can use these
               | features to build their MVPs faster (curious how nobody
               | in the comments mentioned this).
        
             | marcosdumay wrote:
             | > A pricing update to not charge egress fees for object
             | storage and some types of streaming is hardly "disruptive"
             | 
             | Hum. Do you think the largest cloud providers can
             | outcompete that without completely changing their business
             | plans?
             | 
             | Egress costs are always described as the ultimate cloud
             | moat, and the main way those companies lock their clients.
             | I do think there is enough space to disagree here
             | (personally, I have no idea), but the mainstream view is
             | that it fits the (econ-)dictionary definition of
             | disruptive.
        
           | JohnHaugeland wrote:
           | Calling it clickbait is generous
        
           | snowwrestler wrote:
           | The R2 disruption is a reduction in cost. The target of the
           | disruption is Amazon, a company that has decades of
           | experience operating services at break-even or loss to
           | acquire market share.
           | 
           | Quite a lot of the coverage seems founded on the idea that
           | the price difference is an unbridgeable moat for Cloudflare.
           | IMO, let's see. Amazon could lower prices, and/or Cloudflare
           | might need to start charging someone something as volume
           | grows.
        
             | nightpool wrote:
             | If Amazon has to remove egress fees to compete, wouldn't
             | that be a pretty significant disruption to the industry as
             | well? The author's argument isn't that Cloudflare is going
             | to take S3 out of business, it's that _removing egress fees
             | makes a whole new class of applications viable_. I don 't
             | see how the S3 removing egress fees as well would change
             | that argument--it would still be Cloudflare that pushed the
             | storage industry to this new place. In fact, S3 having to
             | remove egress fees to compete would be probably be
             | _greater_ evidence for Cloudflare 's disruptive effect :P
        
             | wpietri wrote:
             | This definitely isn't a disruption in the academic sense of
             | the term: https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-
             | innovation
             | 
             | But even in the casual sense I don't think it's disruptive.
             | They've introduced a competing service at a modestly lower
             | cost. This won't put AWS out of business. Customers won't
             | switch away en masse. It even won't make a noticeable dent
             | in AWS's quarterly revenues.
             | 
             | So this isn't disruption. it's bog-standard business
             | competition. Which I very much welcome.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | NicoJuicy wrote:
               | I think you are underestimating what it could do when
               | they have a complete cloud offering.
               | 
               | And since there are no egress fees, there is no barrier
               | to use a competing product that does something better.
               | 
               | It's like they are launching without vendor lock-in. So I
               | do think it's disruptive, not based on costs alone.
        
               | x0x0 wrote:
               | It's more than modestly lower though in some use cases.
               | 
               | https://twitter.com/quinnypig/status/1443028078196711426
               | 
               | Corey compares the cost of storing 1gb of data in s3 vs
               | r2 and serving it to the internet:
               | 
               | > _If 1 million people download that 1GB this month, my
               | cost with @cloudflare R2 this way rounds up to 13C/. With
               | @awscloud S3 it's [$53,891.16]_
        
         | WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
         | Agree obviously but I think the message is conveyed about what
         | is interesting.
         | 
         | They are competing everywhere CDN, Zero Trust / EdgeSec, Edge
         | Computing, Hosting, etc...
         | 
         | Anyone can think of any good historical good case studies on
         | companies doing this in the past? Like becoming oversaturated,
         | not focusing on one thing enough, or just growing like wild
         | fire across spaces?
        
           | robertlagrant wrote:
           | They seem to be massively diving into anything that can be
           | computed/stored on the edge, and/or can benefit from a high
           | performance network behind that edge. Which makes sense.
           | 
           | Also, they make quite smart choices. An example of one very
           | smart choice is that they don't do Docker for cloud
           | computation, only Javascript/WebASM, and that means they can
           | spin up code in Isolates in V8 that's much more lightweight
           | than having all the infra needed to do Docker.
        
             | robertlagrant wrote:
             | Having said that, said smart choice is also an alternative
             | source of lockin, given their egress charges are minimal.
        
         | acdha wrote:
         | > And no they didnt disrupted anything. You dont disrupt
         | anything in one week actually. Has R2 had any impact on S3
         | business model or customers so far ? Probably not.
         | 
         | Cloud egress costs are the primary lock-in mechanism for cloud
         | providers and that's been recognized as such for many years.
         | This isn't the kind of thing which changes an industry in less
         | than a week but I doubt you will want to defend this claim a
         | year from now -- Cloudflare is an established, rather popular
         | company which many large organizations already trust and this
         | gave them either significant savings or a big negotiating
         | crowbar.
        
           | manigandham wrote:
           | Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth and you can point
           | the origin to whatever you want, including Backblaze which
           | has free interconnect and cheaper pricing.
        
             | acdha wrote:
             | > Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth and you can
             | point the origin to whatever you want.
             | 
             | Not completely: if you used a ton of bandwidth (especially
             | non-HTML/JSON) they'd want you to switch to a paid plan.
             | 
             | Using an arbitrary origin server is similarly different,
             | too: that means a lot more traffic coming back to your
             | origin server unless all of your clients are located right
             | next to each other hitting the same edge node. The
             | mechanism they built to do an on-demand copy from S3 to R2
             | once and serve all subsequent requests from the replicated
             | R2 copy should use substantially less bandwidth and will be
             | faster for all of the requests received from clients which
             | are closer to one of the R2 replicas than your origin
             | server.
        
             | Strom wrote:
             | > _Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth_
             | 
             | Only for HTML content. [1] That is the real disruption
             | here.
             | 
             | --
             | 
             | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682885
        
         | NicoJuicy wrote:
         | You could say the same about Tesla.
         | 
         | But cloudflare is able to scale fast at least.
        
         | input_sh wrote:
         | > I believe it is one of the few (maybe with Stripe) that is
         | able to still work as a startup even though they have thousands
         | of employees, which is quite impressive.
         | 
         | You wouldn't call it impressive if you had to wait >24h for a
         | support response as a user with an enterprise package. I'd call
         | it quite the opposite from my experience with them at my
         | previous job.
        
       | verisimi wrote:
       | I see Cloudflare as part of the system of control of the
       | internet. They can prevent sites from being seen or users from
       | accessing the internet.
       | 
       | I also suspect that their business model is the mafia protection
       | racket - that they may run some of the bots that commit DDOS
       | attacks - it would be in their business interests.
        
         | atdrummond wrote:
         | Why is this downvoted? I understand the second paragraph might
         | be slightly aggressive/inflammatory but the first paragraph
         | alone is a legitimate critique.
         | 
         | I would really appreciate if those who disagree would provide
         | counter arguments, as both sides here offer the potential for
         | an interesting (and important) dialogue about CF and their role
         | in global Internet/WWW infrastructure.
        
           | UncleMeat wrote:
           | The second paragraph is more than "slightly aggressive" in my
           | mind and it ruins the post. It is a wild theory based in no
           | information at all. Cloudflare has a pretty coherent business
           | model already.
        
           | verisimi wrote:
           | Thank you. I appreciate you saying that the second paragraph
           | is aggressive, but I think it would be naive to think that it
           | isn't possible, or even probable - if there's money in play.
           | 
           | A lot of anti-virus protection companies did do exactly this
           | - create the viruses that made their products sell. Its
           | really not without precedent.
        
             | atdrummond wrote:
             | I didn't personally find it aggressive, I was just
             | attempting to understand the motivations of your down
             | voters.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | meowface wrote:
             | >it would be naive to think that it isn't [...] probable
             | 
             | It's _probable_ that Cloudflare is a sophisticated criminal
             | enterprise maliciously DDoSing prospective and existing
             | customers so that they sign up for their (typically free)
             | DDoS mitigation service?
             | 
             | It's possible, but this weird logic of "if there's an
             | incentive to do something bad, then someone's probably
             | doing something bad" - with absolutely no evidence to
             | support it whatsoever - is the logic of conspiracy theories
             | (e.g. 9/11 = inside job, Sandy Hook shooting = hoax,
             | COVID-19 = fake virus to control the public).
        
           | nsonha wrote:
           | Why pick on Cloudflare, what is it about edge computing that
           | makes them particularly well positioned for this kind of
           | abuse and AWS isn't?
        
           | nightpool wrote:
           | "What may be asserted without evidence, may be dismissed
           | without evidence". If someone is going to make the claim that
           | Cloudflare is running an illegal protection racket and funds
           | DDOS attacks against their customer's websites, then the
           | burden of proof is on them to substantiate that claim.
           | Otherwise, it's just pointless bad-faith remarks. And we
           | can't just take the first paragraph in isolation--it depends
           | on the second paragraph for logical support. How could
           | Cloudflare prevent any non-Cloudflare site from being seen,
           | or prevent any non-Cloudflare users from accessing the
           | internet? There is no requirement that anyone use Cloudflare
           | --they just happen to be the best game in town. If you
           | believe otherwise, you have to assert _arguments_ that
           | support your position, you can 't just state your thesis and
           | expect people to guess what your reasoning is.
        
             | atdrummond wrote:
             | As far as I can tell, he:
             | 
             | 1. Never claimed this is actually happening - just that
             | it's a possibility he's considered. I don't think that
             | these kinds of ruminations are so odious and dangerous as
             | to necessitate them being hidden or removed from view.
             | 
             | 2. Never claimed it was illegal. In fact, I'm certain the
             | operation as described by OP would be legal (in many
             | jurisdictions) unless there was another component involved,
             | such as identifiable price gouging.
        
             | verisimi wrote:
             | We're not in court.
             | 
             | But, as I said elsewhere, I think it is pretty
             | understandable corporate behaviour that has been done
             | previously by anti-virus companies.
             | 
             | Why would you not take an opportunity like this in order to
             | create a drama where you are the corporate hero, and have
             | people knocking down your door for your product?
        
       | Waspdotmk wrote:
       | This Web3 thing is huge. Definitely a cutting edge company
        
       | lazyeye wrote:
       | Cloudflare is the good guy now promoting the growth of the
       | decentralised web.
       | 
       | In a decade or two theyll be the bad guy putting up walls and
       | centralising it.
       | 
       | Weve seen this cycle before.
        
       | wackget wrote:
       | The article's not entirely accurate. It says the storage
       | bandwidth fees are "totally elimiated" but that's not true:
       | 
       | > R2 will zero-rate infrequent storage operations under a
       | threshold -- currently planned to be in the single digit requests
       | per second range. Above this range, R2 will charge significantly
       | less per-operation than the major providers.
        
         | ignoramous wrote:
         | Poor man's R2 is already here. Up and running in form of
         | _Workers KV_ ($5 per million writes, $0.5 per million reads, $5
         | per 10GB), which can store blobs upto 25MB. Front it with
         | _Workers Bundled_ ($0.5 per million calls proxied) and it
         | quickly gets real close to what one 'd pay for R2.
         | 
         | And no, unlike Amazon with Lightsail, Cloudflare is okay with
         | anyone bypassing bandwidth charges when using the _Workers
         | Bundled_ [1].
         | 
         | [0]
         | https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing#k...
         | 
         | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791605
        
         | heymax054 wrote:
         | That was the top comment on this HN thread:
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28702997
         | 
         | The reply was: "Per operation charges, even if at the same
         | level as EC2, would still be substantially cheaper."
        
         | jacobwg wrote:
         | R2's final pricing isn't yet announced, but my understanding of
         | the quoted section is that R2 will charge for storage
         | operations (API calls), what S3 calls "Requests & data
         | retrievals" on their pricing page [0]. But _egress_ (bandwidth)
         | fees, which can be the most costly component of an S3 bill, are
         | totally eliminated.
         | 
         | S3 -- Charges for amount of data resident on disk, amount of
         | data retrieved, and each API call
         | 
         | R2 -- Charges for amount of data resident on disk and some API
         | calls (over a threshold). No charge for data retrieved.
         | 
         | [0] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
        
           | mikevm wrote:
           | I can't wait to read the small print when it comes to actual
           | egress bandwidth pricing. I can't believe it's going to
           | actually cost zero dollars for all use-cases.
        
             | pantulis wrote:
             | How can they possibly nullify the bandwith costs?
        
               | x0x0 wrote:
               | extensive peering arrangements
        
         | tylerrobinson wrote:
         | Indeed, the specific terms will be really interesting to watch.
         | Even if the per-operation fees are high by comparison after
         | that threshold, it could still result in a huge savings for big
         | file downloads.
        
       | latchkey wrote:
       | ethereum [sic]
        
       | devit wrote:
       | They claim R2 is only free for infrequent access, and the storage
       | price is still really expensive compared to the cost of hard
       | disks, so the potential for disruption seems quite limited.
       | 
       | There seems to be potential for big disruption only if downloads
       | aren't counted as operation in "Above this range, R2 will charge
       | significantly less per-operation than the major providers".
       | 
       | Based on the release it seems the thing that would be most
       | disrupted is storage and distribution of huge files (one download
       | operation, huge egress bandwidth), which would result in it
       | mainly being used for Mega clones for paid piracy.
        
       | brightball wrote:
       | Article doesn't even mention their dip into email with SPF, DKIM
       | and DMARC record builders. After spending a long time in that
       | industry, I've always thought a solution that was fully
       | integrated with the DNS provider was the ideal.
       | 
       | They are just getting started with the record builders but
       | there's a huge potential runway if they want to take this to its
       | natural finish.
       | 
       | IMO Cloudflare poses the biggest danger to a company like
       | Valimail or Redsift that relies on DNS automation for their
       | solution.
       | 
       | Integrated providers like Mimecast probably don't have anything
       | to worry about. Nor would expertise driven companies focused on
       | consulting, deployment or IT education like dmarcian IMO.
        
       | sdze wrote:
       | Thumbs down to centralisation.
        
       | skeeter2020 wrote:
       | any announcement that conflates a decentralized web with
       | cloudflare is premature at best and likely downright misleading.
       | Distributed Gateways explicitly have CF as the central
       | clearinghouse for all communication.
        
       | davedx wrote:
       | "Cloudflare has announced their "Distributed Web Gateways" which
       | should solve these problems. Developers will interact with HTTP
       | calls, which CloudFlare will translate to PFS or Ethereum
       | functions, while adding Cloudflare added-value services on the
       | HTTP side."
       | 
       | CloudFlare is well on its way to becoming the western version of
       | the Great Firewall of China. Centralizing All The Things.
       | 
       | Except instead of censorship, it'll be used to make sweet cash
       | dollars.
        
         | yellow_lead wrote:
         | A centralized distributed web gateway is truly disruption.
        
       | adventured wrote:
       | > Welcome to the Web 3.0, where your software is decentralized
       | and your users' data truly belongs to them.
       | 
       | Nope.
        
         | SrslyJosh wrote:
         | > Web 3.0 also unlocks the Metaverse, a place where we trade in
         | crypto and have NFTs as intellectual rights.
         | 
         | "Say the line, Bart!"
        
       | leetrout wrote:
       | Author if you are here you have a typo where you say web 2.0
       | instead of 3.0.
       | 
       | Tried to comment on the article but I guess I need an invite to
       | indie hackers and I don't know anyone :D
        
         | greatsaas12 wrote:
         | Looks like it was fixed.
        
       | JohnHaugeland wrote:
       | This author is clueless.
       | 
       | All three of these things were already free.
       | 
       | None of these things are industries.
        
         | opheliate wrote:
         | I would love to know where I can get free cloud storage
         | equivalent to S3.
        
           | slig wrote:
           | Scaleway has 75GB for free every month [1].
           | 
           | [1]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/
        
           | rudian wrote:
           | Probably the misconception comes from "unlimited hosting"
           | providers, which are a lie.
        
       | moffkalast wrote:
       | They've already disrupted facebook, run!
        
       | nrook wrote:
       | Cloudflare really is impressive. Who can forget when they
       | disrupted the retro emulation scene, by protecting the website
       | that drove a prominent emulation developer to suicide? Or when
       | they disrupted Isla Vista by serving the sites where Elliot
       | Rodger was radicalized?
        
         | rudian wrote:
         | One thing that concerned me is that CF kicked a few "bad
         | actors" off their network
         | 
         | One could argue that they have the right and/or duty to do
         | that, but being closer and closer to a "internet backbone"
         | provider, this can become scary.
         | 
         | Would you like water to be cut off to "bad actors"?
        
           | nrook wrote:
           | This is a convenient ethical construction for Cloudflare:
           | "Sure, our customers did terrible things, but really, the
           | real lapse would be if we didn't accept money from them!" But
           | it doesn't hold up. While everyone needs food and water,
           | nobody needs a CDN.
        
           | robertlagrant wrote:
           | I think as long as they were given State-supplied acting
           | lessons, it would work.
        
           | acdha wrote:
           | Those situations aren't analogous: if the water utility cuts
           | me off, my options are things like drilling a well, trucking
           | in water, or moving. If Cloudflare declines not to do
           | business with me, there are many competitors around the world
           | who I can switch to at varying levels of service depending on
           | how much control I want.
        
           | maxk42 wrote:
           | I worked for one of the "bad actors" that was terminated by
           | Cloudflare. To this day they have not provided anyone with a
           | reason for the termination. To my knowledge, the site in
           | question was not breaking any terms of service and when I
           | asked customer support why the account had been terminated
           | they pointed me to the clause that said something to the
           | effect of "Cloudflare may terminate an account for any reason
           | or no reason at all."
           | 
           | They also refused to provide a refund. I will never use
           | Cloudflare again nor recommend them to any of my clients.
        
       | moralestapia wrote:
       | The big question I have regarding R2 (for those no in the lops:
       | Cloudflare's alternative to S3 with no egress fees (!)) is if the
       | terms hold if you choose to use it to host video. If yes, then
       | wow, this truly is disruptive.
        
         | CodesInChaos wrote:
         | There is another possible pricing loophole: They could price
         | the amount of data loaded from R2, regardless if it's for
         | internal use or egress (similar to S3 infrequent access, but
         | cheaper). If they go that route, they'd probably make it per-
         | request for small request, and by-size for big requests.
        
         | yawnxyz wrote:
         | That's a good question, I wonder how that will play along with
         | their Video Streaming service. I guess this wouldn't be hosted
         | streaming, but a downloadable video file, so they'd have
         | different use cases.
        
           | moralestapia wrote:
           | >I wonder how that will play along with their Video Streaming
           | service
           | 
           | Yeah, that's my main concern, are they really going to
           | disrupt even themselves?
           | 
           | >wouldn't be hosted streaming, but a downloadable video file
           | 
           | I agree but then if one can just add a <video src=""> and
           | forget about it (plus, it's free) then streaming wouldn't
           | even be considered (for plenty of use cases).
        
           | grogenaut wrote:
           | streaming is usually just a lot of little 2s video files.
        
         | tejohnso wrote:
         | > if the terms hold if you choose to use it to host video
         | 
         | Pretty damn disingenuous if the terms don't hold based on type
         | of content. There's no such caveat mentioned.
        
           | handrous wrote:
           | You're already gonna be _encouraged_ to move to an Enterprise
           | ($5k+) account if you use too many resources, and /or if too
           | much of your traffic is from non-browser clients, and
           | probably for a bunch of other reasons I don't know about it.
           | The terms under which this may happen are essentially arcane
           | knowledge learned through experience. Think about it: if this
           | weren't the case, every other CDN would already be out of
           | business, rather than rapidly expanding and acquiring and
           | growing.
           | 
           | Plus, you don't get an SLA for any of their "self-serve"
           | plans until the $200/month one.
        
         | Cthulhu_ wrote:
         | I honestly think it'll get flooded with bad actors and they'll
         | be forced to set limits (e.g. download rate limits, which
         | probably wouldn't be in their best interest since it'd occupy a
         | connection for longer).
        
           | avidal wrote:
           | Cf has really mature trust and safety as well as security
           | teams and tools. I've no doubt they've taken bad actors into
           | account considering all of the other offerings they have that
           | have also attracted bad actors.
        
             | distantsounds wrote:
             | Yeah, 8chan definitely weren't bad actors and Cloudflare
             | definitely didn't have to make a PR statement about booting
             | them from their services.
        
             | adventured wrote:
             | No question. They've been dealing with that factor at hyper
             | scale for many years now. The only question is how they've
             | already decided to go about it.
             | 
             | They'll certainly want to make a big splash with the
             | product, given the cloud giants they're taking on. That's
             | better done with fewer limitations initially, even if they
             | know ahead of time the various ways they'll restrict abuse
             | over time.
        
       | greatsaas12 wrote:
       | Seems like these announcements were part of Cloudflare's
       | "Birthday Week"[1]
       | 
       | More features that weren't mentioned by OP:
       | 
       | - CF released an email routing feature
       | 
       | - They released their domain name registrar (you could previously
       | only transfer, but now you can also register domain names) using
       | wholesale prices. I'd also classify this as a "disruption"
       | because CF is not taking any profit with this one (but they have
       | a lot to gain in terms of data if you route your domain traffic
       | through them.)
       | 
       | [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/birthday-week/
        
         | innocenat wrote:
         | The registrar service has been here for some times, but
         | previously you need to transfer domain in instead of register
         | new domain.
        
           | greatsaas12 wrote:
           | Yep, was aware of this, but forgot to mention it. Edited the
           | comment, thanks!
        
         | decrypt wrote:
         | One thing that most folks aren't aware is that Cloudflare
         | registrar requires usage of their nameservers. It's
         | understandable, they are selling domains without a markup and
         | need to make money in other ways. For those that want to use a
         | custom nameserver, Porkbun is a great choice.
        
           | gnat wrote:
           | What is their business model around having your DNS traffic?
           | Selling your "who looked you up and how many times" data? I
           | am struggling to see what secondary income this enables.
        
             | jiveturkey wrote:
             | to own all the eggs
        
             | BenjiWiebe wrote:
             | It makes it extremely easy (and therefore more likely) to
             | use CloudFlare as a CDN/DDoS protection. Just a simple
             | toggle, if they're your DNS server.
        
             | [deleted]
        
       | dvh1990 wrote:
       | There are special risks involved when relying on novel, market
       | breaking features: Your offering will be dependent on that
       | feature remaining available AND cost effective.
       | 
       | If the company ups the price or removes the feature altogether
       | then you will be left without an edge.
        
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