What is Cloudflare CDN and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to Cloudflare CDN
- CloudFlare
Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet. ...
- Google Cloud CDN
Google Cloud CDN leverages Google's globally distributed edge caches to accelerate content delivery for websites and applications served out of Google Compute Engine. Cloud CDN lowers network latency, offloads origins, and reduces serving costs. Once you've set up HTTP(S) Load Balancing, simply enable Cloud CDN with a single checkbox. ...
- Azure CDN
It lets you reduce load times, save bandwidth, and speed responsiveness—whether you’re developing or managing websites or mobile apps, or encoding and distributing streaming media, gaming software, firmware updates, or IoT endpoints. ...
- Akamai
If you've ever shopped online, downloaded music, watched a web video or connected to work remotely, you've probably used Akamai's cloud platform. Akamai helps businesses connect the hyperconnected, empowering them to transform and reinvent their business online. We remove the complexities of technology, so you can focus on driving your business faster forward. ...
- MaxCDN
The MaxCDN Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site’s static file through hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them. ...
- KeyCDN
KeyCDN offers super fast and secure content delivery for minimal loading time. In addition to the CDN, it also offers advanced image processing and many other features such as live logs and Let's Encrypt SSL. ...
- JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles. ...
- Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. ...
Cloudflare CDN alternatives & related posts
- Easy setup, great cdn424
- Free ssl277
- Easy setup199
- Security190
- Ssl180
- Great cdn98
- Optimizer77
- Simple71
- Great UI44
- Great js cdn28
- Apps12
- HTTP/2 Support12
- DNS Analytics12
- AutoMinify12
- Rocket Loader9
- Ipv69
- Easy9
- IPv6 "One Click"8
- Fantastic CDN service8
- DNSSEC7
- Nice DNS7
- SSHFP7
- Free GeoIP7
- Amazing performance7
- API7
- Cheapest SSL7
- SPDY6
- Free and reliable, Faster then anyone else6
- Ubuntu5
- Asynchronous resource loading5
- Global Load Balancing4
- Performance4
- Easy Use4
- CDN3
- Registrar2
- Support for SSHFP records2
- Web31
- Прохси1
- HTTPS3/Quic1
- No support for SSHFP records2
- Expensive when you exceed their fair usage limits2
related CloudFlare posts
For inboxkitten.com, an opensource disposable email service;
We migrated our serverless workload from Cloud Functions for Firebase to CloudFlare workers, taking advantage of the lower cost and faster-performing edge computing of Cloudflare network. Made possible due to our extremely low CPU and RAM overhead of our serverless functions.
If I were to summarize the limitation of Cloudflare (as oppose to firebase/gcp functions), it would be ...
- <5ms CPU time limit
- Incompatible with express.js
- one script limitation per domain
Limitations our workload is able to conform with (YMMV)
For hosting of static files, we migrated from Firebase to CommonsHost
More details on the trade-off in between both serverless providers is in the article
I use Laravel because it's the most advances PHP framework out there, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade and most of all : easy to get a handle on, and to follow every new technology ! PhpStorm is our main software to code, as of simplicity and full range of tools for a modern application.
Google Analytics Analytics of course for a tailored analytics, Bulma as an innovative CSS framework, coupled with our Sass (Scss) pre-processor.
As of more basic stuff, we use HTML5, JavaScript (but with Vue.js too) and Webpack to handle the generation of all this.
To deploy, we set up Buddy to easily send the updates on our nginx / Ubuntu server, where it will connect to our GitHub Git private repository, pull and do all the operations needed with Deployer .
CloudFlare ensure the rapidity of distribution of our content, and Let's Encrypt the https certificate that is more than necessary when we'll want to sell some products with our Stripe api calls.
Asana is here to let us list all the functionalities, possibilities and ideas we want to implement.
- Extremely Fast2
- Very expensive not for newbies2
related Google Cloud CDN posts
- Low Latency2
related Azure CDN posts
Akamai
related Akamai posts
- Easy setup47
- Speed to my clients33
- Great service & Customer Support15
- Shared and Affordable SSL5
related MaxCDN posts
The following will be a series of decisions we made that took BootstrapCDN from 0 to over 74 billion requests a month (and growing).
Initially, I didn’t want to do BootstrapCDN. I have attempted a few projects like it before and they always failed to gain any traction. In June of 2012, my boss at the time (and good friend today), David Henzel got a BuzzSumo Alert coming from an #OpenSource project on GitHub called Bootstrap and someone mentioned that MaxCDN was always looking for projects to sponsor. Long story short, David registered the domain and told me to get to work.
The first version of the site was written in PHP. It was quick and dirty but met the scope. We beta tested it for a month then people started to use it after searching for “bootstrap cdn” on Google.
I was still skeptical until, well, that’s for the next decision.
AMA below. 👇
This is the second Stack Decision of this series. You can read the last one to catch up (link below). Bootstrap, Jacob Thornton aka @fat tweeted about #BootstrapCDN and according to Google Analytics, that sent 10k uniques to the site in 24 hours. Now I was pumped but I knew I was way over my head and needed help. Fortunately, I met my co-maintainer Josh Mervine at the 2013 O’Reilly Velocity Conference and we hit it off immediately. I showed him the MaxCDN and Amazon S3 stats and his eyebrows went up. When I showed him the code, he was very polite, “well, I mean it works but I really want to try Node.js out so I’m just going to rewrite everything in Node and Ruby for the S3 scripts.
I didn’t know what to expect from Josh, to be honest. In the next decision (part 3), I will go over how he completely transformed the project.
AMA below 👇
- Pay-as-you-go40
- Cheapest cdn pricing ever38
- Easy setup27
- No subscription27
- Free shared ssl23
- Fastest cdn i've ever used21
- Cheap17
- Ssd-optimized edge servers16
- Great support15
- Quick support14
- Free Custom SSL7
- Supports HTTP/2 and available globally5
- No time limit for spending credit4
- Build for developers3
- Support Let's Encrypt3
- Supports SPDY2
- Server from Turkey2
- 5 zones included2
- Easy as pie to setup2
- Brotli Support2
- No credit card required for free trial2
- Real-time Log Forwarding2
- Fastest CDN1
- Easy to setup & improve website loading speed1
- Haven't had much time to tinker, but YES1
- Its very reliable and easy to use1
- Great customer support, easy setup1
- A very capable CDN with an affordable price tag0
related KeyCDN posts
Platform Update: we’ve been using the Performance Test tool provided by KeyCDN for a long time in combination with Pingdom's similar tool and the #WebpageTest and #GoogleInsight - we decided to test out KeyCDN for static asset hosting. The results for the endpoints were superfast - almost 200% faster than CloudFlare in some tests and 370% faster than imgix . So we’ve moved Washington Brown from imgix for hosting theme images, to KeyCDN for hosting all images and static assets (Font, CSS & JS). There’s a few things that we like about “Key” apart from saving $6 a month on the monthly minimum spend ($4 vs $10 for imgix). Key allow for a custom CNAME (no more advertising imgix.com in domain requests and possible SEO improvements - and easier to swap to another host down the track). Key allows JPEG/WebP image requests based on clients ‘accept’ http headers - imgix required a ?auto=format query string on each image resource request - which can break some caches. Key allows for explicitly denying cookies to be set on a zone/domain; cookies are a big strain on limited upload bandwidth so to be able to force these off is great - Cloudflare adds a cookie to every header… for “performance reasons”… but remember “if you’re getting a product something for free…”
JavaScript
- Can be used on frontend/backend1.7K
- It's everywhere1.5K
- Lots of great frameworks1.2K
- Fast896
- Light weight745
- Flexible425
- You can't get a device today that doesn't run js392
- Non-blocking i/o286
- Ubiquitousness236
- Expressive191
- Extended functionality to web pages55
- Relatively easy language49
- Executed on the client side46
- Relatively fast to the end user30
- Pure Javascript25
- Functional programming21
- Async15
- Full-stack13
- Setup is easy12
- Its everywhere12
- Future Language of The Web12
- JavaScript is the New PHP11
- Because I love functions11
- Like it or not, JS is part of the web standard10
- Expansive community9
- Everyone use it9
- Can be used in backend, frontend and DB9
- Easy9
- Easy to hire developers8
- No need to use PHP8
- For the good parts8
- Can be used both as frontend and backend as well8
- Powerful8
- Most Popular Language in the World8
- Popularized Class-Less Architecture & Lambdas7
- It's fun7
- Nice7
- Versitile7
- Hard not to use7
- Its fun and fast7
- Agile, packages simple to use7
- Supports lambdas and closures7
- Love-hate relationship7
- Photoshop has 3 JS runtimes built in7
- Evolution of C7
- 1.6K Can be used on frontend/backend6
- Client side JS uses the visitors CPU to save Server Res6
- It let's me use Babel & Typescript6
- Easy to make something6
- Can be used on frontend/backend/Mobile/create PRO Ui6
- Promise relationship5
- Stockholm Syndrome5
- Function expressions are useful for callbacks5
- Scope manipulation5
- Everywhere5
- Client processing5
- Clojurescript5
- What to add5
- Because it is so simple and lightweight4
- Only Programming language on browser4
- Test21
- Easy to learn1
- Easy to understand1
- Not the best1
- Hard to learn1
- Subskill #41
- Test1
- Hard 彤0
- A constant moving target, too much churn22
- Horribly inconsistent20
- Javascript is the New PHP15
- No ability to monitor memory utilitization9
- Shows Zero output in case of ANY error8
- Thinks strange results are better than errors7
- Can be ugly6
- No GitHub3
- Slow2
related JavaScript posts
Oof. I have truly hated JavaScript for a long time. Like, for over twenty years now. Like, since the Clinton administration. It's always been a nightmare to deal with all of the aspects of that silly language.
But wowza, things have changed. Tooling is just way, way better. I'm primarily web-oriented, and using React and Apollo together the past few years really opened my eyes to building rich apps. And I deeply apologize for using the phrase rich apps; I don't think I've ever said such Enterprisey words before.
But yeah, things are different now. I still love Rails, and still use it for a lot of apps I build. But it's that silly rich apps phrase that's the problem. Users have way more comprehensive expectations than they did even five years ago, and the JS community does a good job at building tools and tech that tackle the problems of making heavy, complicated UI and frontend work.
Obviously there's a lot of things happening here, so just saying "JavaScript isn't terrible" might encompass a huge amount of libraries and frameworks. But if you're like me, yeah, give things another shot- I'm somehow not hating on JavaScript anymore and... gulp... I kinda love it.
How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:
Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.
Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:
https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/
(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)
Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark
- Distributed version control system1.4K
- Efficient branching and merging1.1K
- Fast959
- Open source845
- Better than svn726
- Great command-line application368
- Simple306
- Free291
- Easy to use232
- Does not require server222
- Distributed27
- Small & Fast22
- Feature based workflow18
- Staging Area15
- Most wide-spread VSC13
- Role-based codelines11
- Disposable Experimentation11
- Frictionless Context Switching7
- Data Assurance6
- Efficient5
- Just awesome4
- Github integration3
- Easy branching and merging3
- Compatible2
- Flexible2
- Possible to lose history and commits2
- Rebase supported natively; reflog; access to plumbing1
- Light1
- Team Integration1
- Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system1
- Easy1
- Flexible, easy, Safe, and fast1
- CLI is great, but the GUI tools are awesome1
- It's what you do1
- Phinx0
- Hard to learn16
- Inconsistent command line interface11
- Easy to lose uncommitted work9
- Worst documentation ever possibly made7
- Awful merge handling5
- Unexistent preventive security flows3
- Rebase hell3
- When --force is disabled, cannot rebase2
- Ironically even die-hard supporters screw up badly2
- Doesn't scale for big data1
related Git posts
Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:
- GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
- Respectively Git as revision control system
- SourceTree as Git GUI
- Visual Studio Code as IDE
- CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
- Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
- SonarQube as quality gate
- Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
- VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
- Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
- Heroku for deploying in test environments
- nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
- SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
- Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
- PostgreSQL as preferred database system
- Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)
The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:
- Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
- Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
- Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
- Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
- Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
- Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).
It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up
or vagrant reload
we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.
I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up
, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.
We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.
If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.
The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).
Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.