Re: I'm curious
> You know (apparently first hand) that the monthly cost of building a resilient app runs at least 6 figures a year.
Again, we're talking about different things here.
You're talking about end-to-end resiliency in an application context, I'm talking about a feature that makes it possible to cope with a failure in an edge provider (Cloudflare in this case).
You're talking in the context of an application server, whilst CDN's primary domain is serving (and caching) static content (the big money is in serving game artefacts and video). We're talking about completely seperate problem domains with very different solutions.
It's not nearly as expensive as you make out. In fact, it can even be achieved for as little as £60/year (though that price point doesn't come without issues, the risk is still lower than with your authoratives tucked away inside CF).
Fuck, you can do it nearly free if you don't want it automated:
- Have DNS across providers
- CDN1 goes down, update CNAME to point to CDN2
Not that I'd recommend it, but your recovery rate will still be faster than without the ability to switch away.
Something more production ready like Cedexis or Constellix doesn't break the bank either.
The days of CDN being an expensive bespoke thing are long gone, it's a commodity nowadays. Multi-CDN support isn't much different in that respect
I've focused on resiliency because that's what the article is about, but there's a bunch of other knock on effects too. In the early stage of the relationship It knackers a customer's ability to do A/B testing.
Big customers also tend to use different CDNs in different parts of the world - If Cloudflare's coverage is pants in parts of Asia, you might route those users via AliCDN or similar etc. The lack of CNAME support hampers this.
The key thing with both examples is that you generally want it to be transparent to the user, which generally means CNAMEs (I've seen DNAMEs get used too... the horror)
> Against that level of spending, you're going to weigh $2500 priced as an addon?
I think the thing you're missing is that that $2500 is an otherwise unnecessary charge unless you also want support from CF.
It also comes on top of whatever you're paying to implement failover. If you're using something simple (like DNSMadeEasy's fairly limited auto failover) then that 2500 increases your costs many times over.
If Cloudflare were head and shoulders above the competition you might ignore it, but in many locations, they're not.
> But any evaluation of a solution has to be based on total cost
I disagree.
Evaluation of a solution is based on *value* not cost.
CDN customers tend to have a spectrum of criteria. Some will pay the earth for the provider with the lowest latency (in whatever market they care about), some want to spend as little as possible.
Most, obviously, fall somewhere in the middle.
If you're charging extra for something basic that your competitors offer, you need to be able to justify it, either through sheer speed (attracting the left of the spectrum) or by being able to explain that its omission makes lower tiers cheaper (a hard sell with this particular issue).
That's not something Cloudflare have achieved IMO.
> You attacked their business model over this
I think you've overlooked the context I posted under.
My original comment quoted a bit from the article that said it was unacceptable that a single provider could take so much of the net down.
The point in my comment wasn't to attack CF's business model, but to point out that that SPOF was there not because of technical reasons, but because of a business decision by CF.
The guy quoted in the article is a little breathless, but he's right, this should and could have been avoidable.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
