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Comment by ilovecaching | Hacker News Reader

They blog a lot, yes, but CF is a CDN. It doesn’t matter how fancy the technology is if they have less pops or poor targeting.

CF blog is a marketing tool, and a lot of their claims are inflated or are capturing a hype train.

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This product introduces compute, making them a bit more than a pure CDN.

They’re also doing a lot with Rust, which I know you love, incidentally.

> Cloudflare provides DNS services to 12 million websites, adding approximately 20,000 new customers every day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudflare

> Roughly five percent to 10 percent of web traffic now goes through CloudFlare

https://www.wired.com/story/cloudflare-spectrum-iot-protecti... (April 2018)

> 10 trillion requests per month, which is nearly 10 percent of all Internet requests for more than 2.5 billion people worldwide

https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2017/cloudflare-gr... (2017)

Do you know how many pops CF has compared to Akamai?

Number of PoPs would be a pretty weak metric for a CDN, even if that's all they were.

Number of pops is of course critical to a CDN both in providing more availability in a more diverse set of locations, but also in terms of providing a larger backbone and more capacity to protect again attacks and spikes.

165 data centers: https://www.cloudflare.com/network/

Also CF uses anycast geolocation, which is the easy fast way to market, but not nearly as reliable or controllable. You just start buying some colo and let the internet do its thing, and be at the mercy of their peers. Most bigger CDNs and content providers don’t do this for that reason.

Do you work for one of those other CDN providers by chance? It certainly takes a fair bit of work to get an anycast network working, but it's not nearly the controversial move it was eight years ago.

Have you ever setup and maintained anycast? I have, it’s far from “easy.”

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