- You can't serve all kinds of traffic with Cloudflare self-serve plans. Including some of the ones that tend to use the most bandwidth.
- According to the CloudFlare self-serve plan TOS, IIRC, if you start being a too-heavy user on the those plans CloudFlare can (and, I've heard, will) tell you to upgrade to an enterprise plan. Last I checked (this part's personal experience) they're not super interested in serving enterprise customers very far under a minimum $5k/month level, so there's a huge gap there in which other services are a much, much better value.
(The article discusses Argo smart routing, but in my experience Argo tiered caching has lead to the same kind of performance gains this article talks about).
> 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29339642 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24699175
You can also create "page rules" using wildcards to cache dynamic URLs. Eg: /api/*
Another option is to use Workers to fetch from origin and interact with the cache with more control.
I've migrated from CloudFront+AWS WAF to just CloudFlare given Cloudflare's superior (100x better) WAF/Firewall/DDOS protection at a lower cost
Yes I don't think the capitalization has too much impact.
> Yes I don't think the capitalization has too much impact.
You missed a comma.
Additionally CF ofers a good set of system managed WAF rules that you can simply active and CF will manage it for you.
With AWS you're basically on your own. More or less is a bare bones WAF tool.
If you have 1 origin region/server and globally distributed users, in the data shown the RTT from Sydney could be 1000ms, so TLS negotiation of 3 roundtrips could be 3000ms. If you terminate TLS at the edge that could be order of magnitude less.. not more? depends on your setup though.
The other takeaway is AWS documentation is kind of dodgy for some services. But basically everyone knows that already.
