Good, if brief, intro, however right at the outset this tripped me up-
"Cloudflare's rapid growth as a cloud service is due in part to its many unique technologies. Technologies like Anycast and same-IP access are just a few examples"
Anycast has been around and in use since 1989 (finally becoming an RFC in 1993), and was widely used long before Cloudflare. On the CDN side some alternatives did it differently -- Akamai used DNS mapping, for instance, which has detriments and benefits -- but many large enterprises and services used Anycast long before.
Just not sure why they call that a "unique technology", and to a casual reader it implies invention.
Not sure what "same-IP access" is, though maybe they're just describing Anycast?
Cloudflare's rapid growth as a cloud service was overwhelmingly a business model thing, as is usually the case. Everyone could put it in front of their site for free, in the vast majority of cases, completely obliterated overpriced and overwrought competitors like Akamai. Technical excellence came later, but if they pursued a traditional business model in the space they would have been just another CDN.
Comments
Good, if brief, intro, however right at the outset this tripped me up-
"Cloudflare's rapid growth as a cloud service is due in part to its many unique technologies. Technologies like Anycast and same-IP access are just a few examples"
Anycast has been around and in use since 1989 (finally becoming an RFC in 1993), and was widely used long before Cloudflare. On the CDN side some alternatives did it differently -- Akamai used DNS mapping, for instance, which has detriments and benefits -- but many large enterprises and services used Anycast long before.
Just not sure why they call that a "unique technology", and to a casual reader it implies invention.
Not sure what "same-IP access" is, though maybe they're just describing Anycast?
Cloudflare's rapid growth as a cloud service was overwhelmingly a business model thing, as is usually the case. Everyone could put it in front of their site for free, in the vast majority of cases, completely obliterated overpriced and overwrought competitors like Akamai. Technical excellence came later, but if they pursued a traditional business model in the space they would have been just another CDN.