Cloudflare CDN

One of the biggest advantages is Cloudflares Anycast IP architecture combined with their large global network of data centers. This allows traffic to be routed efficiently and improves both latency and availability for our services. The CDN capabilities significantly improve performance by caching and distributing content closer to users worldwide. Another major benefit is the built-in DDoS protection, which provides strong protection for publicly exposed services without requiring additional infrastructure. Automatic SSL encryption also simplifies certificate management considerably. In addition to that, the platform offers a wide range of security features that help protect services from various types of attacks. Overall, Cloudflare removes a lot of complexity from operating internet-facing infrastructure.

It's easy to set up and manage and the platform provides strong security features, performance optimization and caching capabilities in a single solution. It can significantly improve website speed and provide an extra layer of protection against threats like DDoS attacks without complex configuration.

Best in class developer experience, the UI is top-notch and the terraform support through the Cloudflare Terraform provider is insanely good! Deploying changes is very fast, they propagate globally in no time. The support for multiple languages besides JavaScript for Cloudflare Workers is also a big plus, being able to deploy Rust Workers thanks to the WASM support has offered us great value. Cache purging is intuitive to setup and also reliably happens instantly. The bot detection also works very well, cutting down on some spammy traffic.

One downside is that licensing is typically based on individual domains. If you want to use premium features across many domains, the costs can increase quite quickly. For organizations managing a large number of services or domains, this pricing model can become relatively expensive when applying higher tier plans to every domain.

Reliability during outages: When Cloudflare experiences downtime, it can affect a large number of websites at once since so many services depend on it. Another aspect that can be frustrating is that troubleshooting issues can be difficult. Because Cloudflare sits between the user and the origin server, it can sometimes be hard to determine whether a problem is coming from Cloudflare, DNS configuration, caching rules or the origin server itself.

Feels like there's still a bit of vendor lock-in. Things get frustratingly more difficult when moving outside of the Cloudflare ecosystem for parts of your stack. You don't get as much fine-grained control over more complex behaviour, and you often need Cloudflare workers for stuff that feels like it should be trivial config. Without an enterprise plan, support is slow and you're often better off scouring the community forums to find help. No custom cache keys except for he enterprise plan is also a bummer.