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ameliustoday at 9:39 AM3 repliesview on HN

But isn't a CDN a commodity? I.e., you can switch to a different one with almost no effort.


Replies

AndroTuxtoday at 10:49 AM

Depends how deeply integrated it is. Cloudflare offers a web application firewall that can quickly become complex, alongside features like custom routing rules, input parsing, custom headers, etc. As soon as you start integrating any of those into your environment, migration becomes more difficult fast.

pyvpxtoday at 10:04 AM

How does that quip go again…there are only two difficulties in computer science, cache invalidation, naming things, and counting.

Going from one CDN to another can be infuriating even at a surprisingly small scale. Mostly (imo) from caching semantics and counting.

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kyprotoday at 10:11 AM

It's not really a commodity when Cloudflare is often cheaper, simpler and provides a better service compared to it's competitors.

For it to be a commodity there would be no good reason to pick Cloudflare over any alternative and this absolutely isn't the case.