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Comment by riedel | Hacker News Reader

CDNs always existed IMHO. The world before cloudflare was just much more hidden. In general I find their take at the typical cloud business from a network perspective mostly refreshing.

However, I guess they have become the major player now and certainly try to optimize the world towards their business model.

IMHO it needs other enterprises entering the competition. Maybe it could be new more software defined mobile network providers offering edge compute. Maybe data from IoT could never enter the Internet and we could have some confidential computing power when we need it for our IoT stuff. Maybe we could get a more decentralized Internet again...

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> However, I guess they have become the major player now and certainly try to optimize the world towards their business model.

I don't think that's it, and I think the explanation is much more simple and straight-forward.

Cloudflare established a very successful business model around a straight-forward, very transparent, no-bullshit CDN. Now, they started offering other cloud services build around their CDN. Cloudflare Workers kind of extend their CDN pipeline to allow clients to run arbitrary code to customize caching logic, but it turns out their function-as-a-service model is exceptionally good, and higher-level services like email are a low-effort way to meet existing needs.

Cloudflare is far from a no bullshit CDN. The vendor lock in is real with an aggressive unethcial sales model.

I'm not entirely aware of all their products, but just thinking about a CDN, isn't that in many ways kind of fungible? Is it really that hard to migrate to your big cloud co's CDN (CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN) or the several other large competitors without an immense amount of work?

Please, educate me and tell me what's up.

Many of Cloudflare's products are bundled together for reasons.

Trying to unravel all that is an absolute nightmare.

Like what? Give an example. I'm struggling to think of something they offer that is particularly unique and not offered by the other public clouds or several SASS companies.

Much of their model and success was by giving away a lot of service for free.

I'm not discounting their innovations but had they not been VC funded and given away free service I suspect many would still never have heard of them.

> had they not been VC funded and given away free service I suspect many would still never have heard of them.

What does this purity test accomplish? that's just how things work in this industry. Can you name a company that has innovated on their scale that hasn't taken VC?

Oh I remember a time before CDNs and a big part of your startup fundraise was to build out your own setup inside a data center.

It's not the specialization around hosting that's the problem, but that entities running CDNs realized they're in a privileged position in the network, and decided to capitalize on it.

That's not what CDNs are for. They exist for primarily two purposes: a) speed up video loading for end-users, and b) anonymize IP addresses and routes for businesses.

Cloudflare built a business around b). This doesn't save on hosting costs, only lowers some operational and legal risks.

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