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Comment by matsur | Hacker News Reader

I’m the product manager for Argo and author of the blog. Happy to answer any questions!

I’m a customer using Argo, but I have to admit it’s not entirely visible to me how big the benefits are that I’m getting. I’m sure it’s great but.. just how much? Some visualizations would be nice.

Additionally, we have found the Argo tunnel to be relatively unreliable. Once every few months it seems there is an issue with one of the PoPs, and it takes a long time before our tunnels reconnect (several hours even); which imho is fairly inexcusable for something as critical as this. As such we’ve had to migrate away from using the tunnel, leaving me with earlier mentioned questions on the value we’re getting.

Analytics (including some cool visualizations) are available in the Traffic Analytics section of the dashboard. There is always more we can do — drop me a note at rustam@cloudflare.com if there are specific additional things you'd like to see.

Re: tunnel reliability, sorry to hear you've had a poor experience. We've been working hard on hardening things like tunnel reconnection and would love for you to give tunnels another shot.

Hey, will send you an e-mail myself if you don't mind about the first part of analytics. Community MVP here :)

What's the current maturity of Argo tunnel, though? I'm getting the feeling it's still in beta, is this correct?

Is Argo in same category as Google's GlobalLoadBalancer and AWS' GlobalAccelerator? If not, what are the differences?

Can Argo be enabled at network layer, say VPN, and for other protocols say VoIP and not just HTTP/S?

Does Argo take inspiration from published research? If so, which ones?

Thanks.

There are similarities between Argo and the Google/Amazon products you mention (as well as Azure's Front Door). All are aiming to solve similar problems inherent to routing on the Internet.

Re: enabling Argo at the network layer, watch this space :) I'd love to hear more about what you'd like to do such a product — email me! rustam@cloudflare.com

Looking at how Argo is presented (from the blog post), it seems like you've got a really strong use case for SDN, if you're not already using that already. As far as I can tell, dynamically updating routes across an internal network is one of the best non-internal-to-data-center uses of SDN - can you expand a little more on this, if you do use it, or on why you don't, if I'm completely off base?

Cheers, argo seems like an interesting project.

Yes, Argo is very "SDN" under the covers :)

The data plane runs on our x86 fleet and its control plane is driven by custom route computation and propagation systems (discussed a little more in the post). We're excited to talk more about the technical underpinnings of Argo in the future.

>Yes, Argo is very "SDN" under the covers :)

Ha I was reading the post again thinking about how you all did this, and it boiled down to OpenFlow/OVS/SDN magic, or you REALLY went all in on Cisco offerings.

>We're excited to talk more about the technical underpinnings of Argo in the future.

Looking foward to this update, thanks for the response!

You should consider to remake those graphs comparing the jitters. The non-backbone graph shows a majority of data points are below 0, which is impossible, so that means there are a small long tail at the high >20ms band, and you intentionally cropped them out. So when you said "oh the backbone graph is much better!". No it is not, it is very confusing actually.

I think that is showing the different from the average, so the variance in the jitter. It's not the actual latency which is not actually revealed with the Backbone in place.

Is Argo open sourced? If not, will it be open sourced in the future?

Rustam can weigh in here, but I'm not exactly sure what with Argo we'd open source. Argo is a collection of a bunch of different technologies that we use to measure the performance across our transit, peering, and backbone connections. We then send different requests down different paths depending on each customer's particular needs and settings. While I'd imagine we will open source parts of the overall system, there's not really a stand-alone package that we could make available for anyone else to use.

If there's a particular part of the overall Argo that would be helpful for you or others, let us know and we'll certainly consider it. Here's a list of things we've built at Cloudflare and open sourced already: https://cloudflare.github.io/

Frequent user of argo/argo tunnel checking in. As far as I know, the network/lower level parts are not yet in the open, but the tunnel bits are:

- Tunnel (cloudflared): https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared

- Argo as ingress (k8s): https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-ingress-controller/

Can I use Argo as a localtunnel alternative in development?

Yes you can. You can run an Argo Tunnel without a Cloudflare account using the feature below. It's like ngrok, but with Argo Smart Routing.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/argo-tunnel/trycloudflare/

Is the official motto: Argo FUrself? ;)

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