← Back to context

Comment by derefr

3 days ago

Cloudflare isn't a cloud in the traditional sense; it's a CDN with extra smarts in the CDN nodes. CF's comparative advantage is in doing clever things with just-big-enough shared-nothing clusters deployed at every edge POP imaginable; not in building f-off huge clusters out in the middle of nowhere that can host half the Internet, including all their own services.

As such, I wouldn't be overly surprised if all of CF's non-edge compute (including, for example, their control plane) is just tossed onto a "competitor" cloud like GCP. To CF, that infra is neither a revenue center, nor a huge cost center worth OpEx-optimizing through vertical integration.

5 comments

derefr

Reply
whatevertrevor  3 days ago

But then you do expose yourself to huge issues like this if your control plane is dependent on a single cloud provider, especially for a company that wants to be THE reverse proxy and CDN for the internet no?

  • snowwrestler  3 days ago

    Cloudflare does not actually want to reverse proxy and CDN the whole internet. Their business model is B2B; they make most of their revenue from a set of companies who buy at high price points and represent a tiny percentage of the total sites behind CF.

    Scale is just a way to keep costs low. In addition to economies of scale, routing tons of traffic puts them in position to negotiate no-cost peering agreements with other bandwidth providers. Freemium scale is good marketing too.

    So there is no strategic reason to avoid dependencies on Google or other clouds. If they can save costs that way, they will.

    • whatevertrevor  3 days ago

      Well I mean most of the internet in terms of traffic, not in terms of the corpus of sites. I agree the long-tail of websites is probably not profitable for them.

  • mbreese  3 days ago

    True, but how often do outages like this happen? And when outages do happen, does Cloudflare have any more exposure than Google? I mean, if Google can’t handle it, why should Cloudflare be expected to? It also looks like the Cloudflare services have been somewhat restored, so whatever dependency there is looks like it’s able to be somewhat decoupled.

    So long as the outages are rare, I don’t think there is much downside for Cloudflare to be tied to Google cloud. And if they can avoid the cost of a full cloud buildout (with multiple data centers and zones, etc…), even better.