I Don’t Understand CloudFlare

If you know the answer to all this, I’d love to hear it, because I can’t figure this out. What’s the real point of CloudFlare?

Fairly recently I was reading Tony Perez’s post about CloudFlare vs Incapsula vs ModSecurity. As regular readers may know, I am frenemies with Mod_Security. I often want to kill it with fire, but I never disable it entirely because it protects my site from hackers. By using Mod_Security I limit my chances of having Bobby Tables kill my site.

Using Mod_Security gives you some protection from simple SQL injections, but also XSS attacks. You can integrate it with things like Project Honeypot. As they put it:

ModSecurity™ is an open source, free web application firewall (WAF) Apache module. With over 70% of all attacks now carried out over the web application level, organizations need all the help they can get in making their systems secure. WAFs are deployed to establish an external security layer that increases security, detects and prevents attacks before they reach web applications. It provides protection from a range of attacks against web applications and allows for HTTP traffic monitoring and real-time analysis with little or no changes to existing infrastructure.

And you know what? It really does all that.

So what’s CloudFlare? It’s an intermediary between your site and the world which caches your site, compresses data, and gives people the fastest version of your site. In the event your site is down, they’ll serve cached versions. They even give you a pretty picture.

The first time I heard about this, I arched my eyebrows in surprise and confusion. I’m going to make my site faster by putting more layers between the reader and my content? That means instead of just relying on my server and host to be fast, serve compressed pages, keep the lights on, keep a speedy connection to the Intertubes, and do all the things that needs to happen for the magic pipe between my website and you guys, I’m doing all that and trusting someone new to help me do it better. Interesting, Captain. How are they doing this?

CloudFlare has a few tricks to do this: CDN (content loads faster if it’s stored local to the people visiting the site), content optimization (minimizes and compresses page content), security (protecting you from DDOS and SQL injection), and analytics.

Except when I look at that list I think that I already use mod_pagespeed to minimize and compress my content, mod_security to protect me (also Config Server Firewall for the DDoS stuff), and analytics is done by my server or Google. For me, that means the only thing they’re offering that I don’t have is a CDN. I read up on CloudFlare’s CDN, and they tout not having the weight of 15 years legacy crap. That’s a tricky edge to dance on, since they also don’t have the experience of those 15 years, or the network. In fact, looking at their network map, they have nothing in South America. Guess what the number two location is for people visting my sites? Brazil.

And this, my children, is why you study your stats to understand who is visiting your site, where from, why, and with what browsers. Right away I can see that CloudFlare, while interesting, doesn’t seem to have any benefit for me. If I decide that I want a CDN, it’ll probably cost me around $30 more a month, minimum, for my sites and what they have on them today. Oh but wait, you say, CloudFlare is free?

Yeaaaah. I don’t trust free services very much. A free app, once I download it and put it on my server, I keep. A free service is hosted on someone else’s server, at their whimsy, and is supported as they see fit. Yes, this means I don’t trust Facebook or Twitter. A free service is interesting only in that it lets me try it before I buy it, and for that, I approve of how CloudFlare does it. But the problem is today I went to a website and saw this:

What did I do? I didn’t visit this website. They can brag about the whole 30ms response time all they want, but if I went to a website and hit a barrier like that, I stop because it’s getting in the way of my surfing. That was my initial quandary about CloudFlare after all. How can it provide all these awesome things without getting in the way? And it can’t for everyone. At first I thought it was because I was going through bit.ly and it worried I was a spammer (okay, fair enough), so I tried manually, and it was the same problem. I just went to the page normally now, and it’s been well more than “5 seconds” and the site still hasn’t loaded.

I fundamentally dislike anything that causes my users to do ‘more’ to get to my content. I think that it’s more harmful than a slow site, and it’s more harmful than letting these bad eggs visit my site. The right place to block a naughty person is when they’re doing something naughty. If my IP is a range of DDoS attackers, that’s one thing. You shouldn’t be detecting as the page loads, delaying me almost 30 seconds, and then loading the page. This delay is supposedly for my protection (me the site runner, not the visitor). Okay then, what are they protecting me from?

Part of CloudFlare’s service is something called a Web Application Firewall (WAF), which is fancy-speak for saying their computer looks at what people are coming to your site to do, what data they’re sending, and tries to figure out if they’re nice visitors (which it should let through) or naughty hackers (which it should block).(From WP Shine Cloudflare: Early Reports Question Effectiveness as Website Security Tool)

WAF came up before, with Mod_security. And at this moment, I go to a picture. Here’s what Tony parsed from the data:

He asked on Google+ what we took from that article, and my reply was “That the months I spent mastering mod_security was totally worth it.” If you don’t trust Tony’s numbers, you can read the full report on slideshare for yourself. Tony has the same feelings about Captcha as I do, by the way, though less strongly. I despise it more than I hate hotlinkers, and I hate hotlinking. Captchas are the worst barrier between content and consumer that was ever invented. They don’t work, they’re not accessibility friendly, and they are rarely implemented well. Hotlinking may be theft, but Captchas are shouting “No soup for you!”

Which brings me to my point.

What is CloudFlare doing? In plain english, can someone explain to me how it would benefit me? Ignoring the CDN aspect, the only WAF part I can see benefiting me is that CloudFlare (and Incapsula for that matter) essentially crowdsource the list of people who are ‘bad’ and shouldn’t access my site. Which is cool, and that I certainly like. It’s sort of like a Project Honeypot for baddies (and by the way, that would be a nice feature). Having the world bring in the list of bad people, as well as their patterns, and sharing that back out is a great way to keep everyone up to date quickly and seamlessly.

I really just can’t see why I’d ever want to use CloudFlare. It would certainly be a cheap and easy way to put some possible gain on my site, but in the long run I feel that managing these things myself (or hiring someone to do it) would be a better business solution. It saves me from the dread blackbox spam killer, which means I always know what’s going on. Now I know not everyone is capable of handling all this themselves, but from what I’ve seen, most webhosts already have mod_security running. So lets drop the WAF argument from the table, and we come down to the best thing CloudFlare’s doing is acting as a CDN and compressing content. That’s not good enough for me. At that point, you may as well use Google’s PageSpeed Service

I’m sure there are great reasons for using CloudFlare, but I just can’t see it.

Quick ETA… Talking to a coworker, it occurred to us that I may just not be their audience. I’m too big already and I took care of most of what they do. I can look at this and think “If I just have a small site and I want to speed it up on a shared server where I have no root nothings” then it looks way more reasonable. But I’m not.