Yesterday we let down the internet. Sorry...
(Cloudflare, every 4-5 months)
Matthew Prince
Cloudflare has capable and well-versed engineers, and working there means you've got what it takes.
The thing is that Cloudflare isn't the problem. There are other ISP-level CDNs like Akamai. At times during the early 2010s, I had to deploy large-scale infrastructure and work with Akamai.
Akamai tooling was absolutely horrible. It took 30m-120m just to clear some caches. It was big, it was slow, and it didn't scale. Akamai was a giant back then. If you needed large-scale video streaming, you had one choice effectively.
In 2015 I saw some setups with Cloudflare. Fast. Simple. Nice UI. Fewer features, but spiffy.
Now that we are approaching 2026, Cloudflare is a victim of its own success. The company isn't profitable as far as I know. Competitors went bankrupt earlier. There was a time when CDNs died, like Highwinds. I also think Fastly wasn't always great, financially speaking.
Scaling internet access isn't only a tech question. It's a cost question.
- You can use AWS CloudFront. Not for the same money, though.
- You can use Akamai. You will pay 3x.
- I don't know if Akamai has these CAPTCHA and anti bot tools, or if their acquisition of Prolexic went well. I haven't heard of Akamai mitigating DDoS attacks lately.
- Cloudflare makes WAF deployments easy. I remember times when it cost nerves to get a WAF in place because developers didn't play along. The consolidation of performance and security Cloudflare offers acted as a forcing function. In combination with the cost savings, developers didn't have a choice, and now we have WAFs at scale on the internet.
Personally, I will move my stuff out of Cloudflare because I can. But if you have large-scale websites, you will use a calculator rather than a benchmark tool.
Networking on this level is expensive. Cloudflare isn't expensive. It's like ALDI.
