Comment by amelius

4 hours ago

But isn't a CDN a commodity? I.e., you can switch to a different one with almost no effort.

Depends how deeply integrated it is. Cloudflare offers a web application firewall that can quickly become complex, alongside features like custom routing rules, input parsing, custom headers, etc. As soon as you start integrating any of those into your environment, migration becomes more difficult fast.

How does that quip go again…there are only two difficulties in computer science, cache invalidation, naming things, and counting.

Going from one CDN to another can be infuriating even at a surprisingly small scale. Mostly (imo) from caching semantics and counting.

It's not really a commodity when Cloudflare is often cheaper, simpler and provides a better service compared to it's competitors.

For it to be a commodity there would be no good reason to pick Cloudflare over any alternative and this absolutely isn't the case.