HACKER Q&A
📣 jcuenod

How to Compete with Cloudflare


This week we're going to see a bunch more announcements from CF. They'll probably all have a top comment about how CF is the MITM of the internet and a single point of failure. Is this simply the future we're doomed to live in?

  👤 pramodbiligiri Accepted Answer ✓
Ben Thompson has analyzed in his blog how Cloudflare applied the Disruptive Innovation model - https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/. The CTO of Cloudflare sort of acknowledged that on HN back then - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28708371

There must be new niches ("value networks" as per that blog) that Cloudflare finds not worthwhile to serve. Usually they're at the lower end or the "nonconsumption" case, as described in the above blog post. That's one way to chip away at a bit of their customer base.

But it's best to just focus on customers and not imagine you're "competing with Cloudflare". Nothing to be gained by framing it that way.

👤 dave4420
I don’t understand why people are so up in arms about Cloudflare being a MITM, but not e.g. AWS API Gateway being a MITM.
👤 melonrusk
Gatekeeper ?

https://github.com/AltraMayor/gatekeeper/wiki

👤 jacooper
Cloudflare offers a lot of stuff, if you mean compete on DDOS protection, you best case is host-provider DDOA protection, which won't MITM connections.
👤 bethecloud
Best way to compete with Cloudflare is to use decentralized cloud storage options, that are compatible with S3, cheaper, and faster – like storj.io