Cloudflare Case Study
Author: Per Kristian Kronborg <pkkronborg>Introduction
Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) and cloud security platform that provides website optimization, security, and performance services.
Brief History
- 2009: Cloudflare founded in July 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Halloway and Michelle Zatlyn.
- 2010: In June Cloudflare released a beta to selected members of Project Hoeny Pot
- 2010: On September 27, Cloduflare was released.
- 2016: A major Cloudflare bug leaked data including passwords and autentication tokens from customer websites.
- 2014: Cloudflare began providing free DDoS mitigation for artists, activists, journalists, and human rights groups under the name “Project Galileo.”
- 2017: Cloudflare releases Cloudflare Workers, a serverless computing platform for creating new applications without configuring or maintaining infrastructure
- 2019: September 13, first day of trading on NYSE.
- 2019: Cloudflare released WARP, a free VPN Service for mobile devices.
- 2022: Cloudflare provided paid services to aprrox 160 000 customers.
Main Features
The main feature of using Cloudflare is to leverage the network resources provided by Cloudflare to deliver content and services closer to the users visiting your site.
| Features | Description |
|---|---|
| Improves Website & App Performance | Websites loads faster by distributing closer to the end user by using Clouflares network that spans over 320 cities and 120 countries |
| Reduces bandwidth costs | Less data to be transfered in and out of website host server |
| Increase content availability and redundancy | Can handle more traffic due to the distribution of content and withstand hardware failure better than origin servers |
| Built-in security | Advanced DDos-Protection, Web Application Firewall and SSL/TLS Certificates |
| Load Balancing | Optimizes distributing of traffic accross mulitple servers |
| Cloudflare Workers | Serverless computing plattform |
| Analytics | Analytics for your website (traffic, security and performance) |
Market Comparison
Comparison between Amazon Cloudfront and Cloudflare
| Feature | Amazon Cloudfront | Cloudflare |
|---|---|---|
| Content Delivery | Global network of edge locations for content delivery | Global CDN with extensive edge locations |
| Performance | Low-latency content delivery for improved user experience | Faster page loads with content caching and optimization |
| Security | Provides SSL/TLS encryption and integrates with AWS WAF | Offers DDoS protection, WAF, SSL/TLS encryption, and more |
| Scalability | Automatically scaling for trafic spikes | Handles traffic fluctuations with load balancing |
| Accessiblity | Can only be accessed through configured URLs | No need for specific URLs |
| Pricing Model | Pricing based on data transfer and requests | Offers free and paid plans with various levels of features |
| Usage | User interface with a steep learing curve for user not familiar with AWS | Easy to use, friendly interface |
Getting Started
You dont need to change your hosting provider and no code changes are required.
- Create an account Sign up
- Log in
- Add site: Add site by clicking add site in the top navigation bar. Enter your websites apex domain. Click add site.
- Select plan level (Free, Pro, Business, Enterpirce)
- Review DNS settings
- Update your domain servers with the ones provided by Cloudflare
Conclusion
The main advantage of Cloudflare is the security, speed and easy to use. It is also very appealing to small businesses and startups.
It limitations are limited control of the CDN configuration and websites may be very reliant to Cloudflares services.