Comment by simonw
21 hours ago
If there's any company in the world that can survive a lot of extra traffic being pushed through their systems it's Cloudflare.
I bet these new tunnels end up being a fraction of a percentage point of their network traffic.
Yeah, I don't doubt their infrastructure at all. In fact, I rate them fairly high in terms of reliability and performance. I've honestly been a fan of them for a very long time - it's just I'm watching all of this centralization happen and it sets my Spidey sense off. Like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Gotcha, that totally makes sense.
The "centralization" which is cloudflare basically running its own walled garden version of the interent (how often do you see a cloudflare page checking if you're human?) is exactly why a lot of people do NOT like cloudflare. And if you've known about CF and its leadership since their inception you'd be even more wary of sticking your stuff over there.
I've migrated many companies off of cloudflare, usually because they end up pissing off companies when a contract renewal comes up and they slam them with massively increased bills and almost useless support if you aren't very high paying enterprise. I don't know how many CF support tickets I've just given up on over the last 15 years, usually related to their admin page, workers or some weird thing their system does that wasn't documented and I just stop getting responses and definitely don't get fixes.
If you ever worked in webhosting the Cloudflare wordpress/etc extensions are everywhere and back when I did work in hosting tons of support tickets were made because of CF. Could be way better now, I don't go near that industry these days.
The casual CF user sticking it in front of a blog they rarely look at and the business forced CF user has a very different experience. I cringe and seriously consider if I'm interviewing for an infra role and they use cloudflare. Usually it's startups that grew into larger businesses.
I didn't take it as a capacity concern, but a "how much data do they get to look at" one.
It’s a concentration of power issue.
Given they seem to mostly offer services that are about as easy to switch away from as you could hope for, compared to, say, companies who write loads of CF that only runs on AWS, and I can't imagine why this keeps on being said for Cloudflare specifically. What power do they have?
It doesn't matter that they're easy to switch away from. It matters that people haven't actually switched away from them.
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Don’t the free tunnels have explicit limits on bandwidth and streaming?
They see all the traffic in cleartext. Plus you have to trust them not to maliciously alter your traffic. As a US company, their options may be limited if they are coerced by their government to do so.
Just use TLS / mTLS over the tunnel, no?