Not really unexpected, US domination of "tech" is near total, even if the sustained political will exists (and I'm not sure it will for long enough) unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months.
Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier.
Personally I think we absolutely should, I just don't think we will.
Barring them doing something so egregiously awful we don't have the choice, Governments can move fast when they want to but efficient government scares the shit out of me because it rarely happens outside of a genuinely serious crisis.
> Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier.
I'm thinking the opposite might be the way to go here.
We already know that "retaliation" comes from the US government regardless if you did something or not, so most of us (Europeans) have stopped pretending there is a way of preventing it.
Even more, if we piss off Trump enough, he might be dumb enough to try to block European access to CloudFlare, or something similar and maybe even dumber.
So with this, maybe the goal should actually be to try to piss off Trump and the US administration as much as possible, in order for them to start reacting and cutting off some stuff, so we (again, Europeans) basically gets forced off CloudFlare et al.
Lots of companies already finished moving away from storing their primary data in the US, lots of companies is in process of doing so (albeit some look like they'll take forever) but also lots of companies still aren't prepared for the future, would be nice if US government could make the decision a bit easier for them to make :)
While I theoretically agree, the issue is that Trump will connect economical issues to blowing up NATO Article 5, leaving NATO completely, or retracting intelligence or Starlink for Ukraine.
So for the most part, the EU has to work slowly and under the radar.
That said, my worry is that we'll be back to business as usual if the midterms look favorable. Even the urgency present during January's Greenland threats was gone after a few months. I fear that we don't have the long-term focus and planning to make sovereignty really happen. But I'd love to be surprised.
Hey Claude, can you move the ciphercue blog to Cloudflare so it can deal with traffic from HN?
On a more serious note, Cloudflare comes packed with features even on its free plan which makes it useful for any size website. For a real business it's one of the cheapest options for DDoS protection on the market. Some years ago you would have paid a fortune for Akamai or Level3 to help keep you online and now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business.
I think they articulated the underlying issue well. Cloudflare is too attractive for individuals and small businesses. For instance, my personal website has a healthy amount of traffic, but means nothing at CDN scale. I considered moving to a EU CDN company, but they all have per GB/TB pricing. It would cost me nothing now, but what if my site comes under attack or someone starts hotlinking a large file? So, I stay with Cloudflare because with their free plan I don't have to worry about such contingincies.
I would even be happy to pay for it, but for individuals and small business the 'black swan' events that could bankrupt them will keep them from switching to a pay-as-you-go service.
> now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business
You're delusional if you think that $200/month is appropriate for a small business to pay to host a website... Most websites don't need a CDN nor DDOS protection, you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you, but besides that, you've basically fallen for the marketing from Cloudflare that everything requires CDN and that somehow $200/month is a small amount of money for a small business.
They're fine for a CDN but overall their offering surprisingly immature IME. The devx for their hosted scripts/database just isn't there, and e.g. they only allow one global API key with full permissions, etc.
They don't have Cloudflare Tunnels which is almost too good to pass up.
I don't particularly understand how CF makes money on it, with the many high traffic sites I have used that I know don't pay CF a dime. Tunnels adds so much more overhead in compute on both ends more than their normal CDN/proxy would.
The problem is that we have spent 40 years adopting US technology, across multiple generations of software developers and decision makers, while everyone was supposedly on the same side.
It will take similar amount of years to go back into the cold war heterogeneous computing landscape of the 60, early 90s.
This assuming there would be an willingness across all European countries to actually push for that, and not jump out when it gets too hard and search for compromises instead.
This is why most sovereignty initiatives focus mostly on SaaS products and hardly on actual computing devices.
I'd also be interested in share of companies using a CDN in the first place. UK has 17k sites, while France and Germany, so countries with about equal and higher population than the UK, have only 4k and 6k sites behind a CDN.
I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany?
> I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany?
Maybe our countries are just small enough to not be overwhelmed by traffic? Most websites I've built and launched for Spanish national companies, that only have other Spaniards as users and customers, haven't needed any CDN at all, because you don't suddenly get 1K req/s. Meanwhile, launch a global website in English, that even get the slightest amount of popular, and all of a sudden you reach 1K req/s very quickly. Add on top that people usually don't even give two cents about performance, and adding CDN on top as a saving grace seems like an easy tradeoff.
So, why add a CDN when you don't need it? :) Probably 80% of everything I've ever deployed never needed a CDN in the first place, but I also save it as a thing in my toolbox to be used sparingly, rather than a default thing I slap on top of everything.
nginx can do about 20krps per CPU for static files. You only need CDN if you want to improve time to DOM loaded in locations where time to first byte is over ~100ms and can be improved with local caching.
If all your users are in Spain and you don’t care how fast your site loads for a techbro in California, you indeed don’t need CDN.
Reduces latency when the cached content is served from a local cdn pop, allows you to absorb some level of DDoS, can absorb traffic spikes more easily so infra can be more static, reduces load on server if assets are dynamically generated on the backend but can are cacheable, some senses can lead to simpler deployment as you serve assets from an object bucket, so no need to deal with keeping that data in your cluster, but that's minor.
There are downsides too, cost, over caching, privacy/security perhaps too.
It depends on what you're trying to serve, but it's used to either save you money or as an insurance (or both). You don't need a CDN overall. But if you grow large enough, at some point you'll run into one of these three situations:
- Your public traffic costs you so much to repeatedly process that it's cheaper to let some service cache the common responses instead. (Where the cache size is larger than anything you'd want to support yourself. For example, if it's <1G and survives your service restarts, you may want to do it yourself)
- Your customers on the other side of the world start complaining that the resources take ages to load.
- Someone floods you with enough traffic that you can't respond to real customers traffic anymore. You get a ransom email to pay them to stop. But there are enough groups doing that that paying is useless because someone else will try again in a few days. If you're providing a service where people pay you to use the website, you're losing money until you solve this problem.
Because an average request would have to travel half the globe, so setting up a simple HTTPS connection would already take a second. That's completely unacceptable for static content.
Not only would transfer be slow, they would also be much more pressing on the network as the request would occupy huge stretches and many interconnects and switches.
Furthermore, it hardens the website against DDoS and adds robustness for regional failures.
If you have a very inefficient backend (maybe legacy project?), you have massive amount of traffic (say 100K req/s or above) or you really must have sub-500ms latency absolutely everywhere in the world, then it might make sense to slap a CDN (or similar) on top of that.
In pretty much any case outside of that, it makes no sense to waste the time, money or effort on CDNs. But, all the CDN companies seemingly have convinced half the internet that you absolutely must use a CDN, otherwise you'll get hacked/broke/killed/sent to the moon, and they've been successful with this campaign too seemingly.
Since it appears to have gotten hugged to death - https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue...
Not really unexpected, US domination of "tech" is near total, even if the sustained political will exists (and I'm not sure it will for long enough) unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months.
Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier.
Personally I think we absolutely should, I just don't think we will.
Barring them doing something so egregiously awful we don't have the choice, Governments can move fast when they want to but efficient government scares the shit out of me because it rarely happens outside of a genuinely serious crisis.
Yeah, I think only in crypto the non-us providers have a leg up, because running a node just needs an instance.
lots of efficient government happens outside of a serious crisis, but then you don't notice it.
Compared to the Spanish empire, Napoleon and Hitler the Americans are but whiny children. It would be one last hurrah for my country to break away.
> Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier.
I'm thinking the opposite might be the way to go here.
We already know that "retaliation" comes from the US government regardless if you did something or not, so most of us (Europeans) have stopped pretending there is a way of preventing it.
Even more, if we piss off Trump enough, he might be dumb enough to try to block European access to CloudFlare, or something similar and maybe even dumber.
So with this, maybe the goal should actually be to try to piss off Trump and the US administration as much as possible, in order for them to start reacting and cutting off some stuff, so we (again, Europeans) basically gets forced off CloudFlare et al.
Lots of companies already finished moving away from storing their primary data in the US, lots of companies is in process of doing so (albeit some look like they'll take forever) but also lots of companies still aren't prepared for the future, would be nice if US government could make the decision a bit easier for them to make :)
While I theoretically agree, the issue is that Trump will connect economical issues to blowing up NATO Article 5, leaving NATO completely, or retracting intelligence or Starlink for Ukraine.
So for the most part, the EU has to work slowly and under the radar.
That said, my worry is that we'll be back to business as usual if the midterms look favorable. Even the urgency present during January's Greenland threats was gone after a few months. I fear that we don't have the long-term focus and planning to make sovereignty really happen. But I'd love to be surprised.
I don't think the EU has the capability to work fast and just is opting not to.
> The front door is not the whole stack
Hey Claude, can you move the ciphercue blog to Cloudflare so it can deal with traffic from HN?
On a more serious note, Cloudflare comes packed with features even on its free plan which makes it useful for any size website. For a real business it's one of the cheapest options for DDoS protection on the market. Some years ago you would have paid a fortune for Akamai or Level3 to help keep you online and now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business.
Do you get paid commission for comments like this? Genuinely feels like an ad-read
I think they articulated the underlying issue well. Cloudflare is too attractive for individuals and small businesses. For instance, my personal website has a healthy amount of traffic, but means nothing at CDN scale. I considered moving to a EU CDN company, but they all have per GB/TB pricing. It would cost me nothing now, but what if my site comes under attack or someone starts hotlinking a large file? So, I stay with Cloudflare because with their free plan I don't have to worry about such contingincies.
I would even be happy to pay for it, but for individuals and small business the 'black swan' events that could bankrupt them will keep them from switching to a pay-as-you-go service.
I was explaining why I believe it's a super popular service. I have no affiliation or stock, just a regular user.
> now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business
You're delusional if you think that $200/month is appropriate for a small business to pay to host a website... Most websites don't need a CDN nor DDOS protection, you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you, but besides that, you've basically fallen for the marketing from Cloudflare that everything requires CDN and that somehow $200/month is a small amount of money for a small business.
What you're paying for is business continuity, not for them to host your site. I know you can host the site itself on much cheaper infrastructure.
Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there
Like bunny.net - its still tiny compared to CF but hopefully they will grow and won't adopt the crappier bits of CF.
They're fine for a CDN but overall their offering surprisingly immature IME. The devx for their hosted scripts/database just isn't there, and e.g. they only allow one global API key with full permissions, etc.
They don't have Cloudflare Tunnels which is almost too good to pass up.
I don't particularly understand how CF makes money on it, with the many high traffic sites I have used that I know don't pay CF a dime. Tunnels adds so much more overhead in compute on both ends more than their normal CDN/proxy would.
big corps = big money. they dont make money from your $5/mth static site, its practically free when you're at CF scale
But isn't a CDN a commodity? I.e., you can switch to a different one with almost no effort.
I feel like your site needs a CDN, it takes over 40 seconds to load your front page from the EU.
Maybe a European CDN, like Bunny (Slovenia)
Do they also have their own infra or are they just an entity between the customer and AWS?
They have their own infra but its not the size of CF. Chicken and Egg
The problem is that we have spent 40 years adopting US technology, across multiple generations of software developers and decision makers, while everyone was supposedly on the same side.
It will take similar amount of years to go back into the cold war heterogeneous computing landscape of the 60, early 90s.
This assuming there would be an willingness across all European countries to actually push for that, and not jump out when it gets too hard and search for compromises instead.
This is why most sovereignty initiatives focus mostly on SaaS products and hardly on actual computing devices.
Tale as old as time (or at least as the 1970s): nobody ever got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Cloudfare / AWS / Azure.
9 out of 10 corporate decisions are for blame avoidance / ass covering.
I'd also be interested in share of companies using a CDN in the first place. UK has 17k sites, while France and Germany, so countries with about equal and higher population than the UK, have only 4k and 6k sites behind a CDN.
I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany?
> I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany?
Maybe our countries are just small enough to not be overwhelmed by traffic? Most websites I've built and launched for Spanish national companies, that only have other Spaniards as users and customers, haven't needed any CDN at all, because you don't suddenly get 1K req/s. Meanwhile, launch a global website in English, that even get the slightest amount of popular, and all of a sudden you reach 1K req/s very quickly. Add on top that people usually don't even give two cents about performance, and adding CDN on top as a saving grace seems like an easy tradeoff.
So, why add a CDN when you don't need it? :) Probably 80% of everything I've ever deployed never needed a CDN in the first place, but I also save it as a thing in my toolbox to be used sparingly, rather than a default thing I slap on top of everything.
nginx can do about 20krps per CPU for static files. You only need CDN if you want to improve time to DOM loaded in locations where time to first byte is over ~100ms and can be improved with local caching.
If all your users are in Spain and you don’t care how fast your site loads for a techbro in California, you indeed don’t need CDN.
Their index being paywalled, it's not possible to answer about its content.
I wanted to check if the 5 customers for which I already did a change on their Cloudflare settings today where on the list, but can't do.
I'd be interested in what data they're using in the first place. It looks like their data is behind a paywall.
Also, funny that their page with for "Companies running Cloudflare" says there are only "887 European organisations using Cloudflare."
Naive question: How important is it to use a CDN in the first place? Why can't you just serve the content yourself?
Reduces latency when the cached content is served from a local cdn pop, allows you to absorb some level of DDoS, can absorb traffic spikes more easily so infra can be more static, reduces load on server if assets are dynamically generated on the backend but can are cacheable, some senses can lead to simpler deployment as you serve assets from an object bucket, so no need to deal with keeping that data in your cluster, but that's minor. There are downsides too, cost, over caching, privacy/security perhaps too.
It depends on what you're trying to serve, but it's used to either save you money or as an insurance (or both). You don't need a CDN overall. But if you grow large enough, at some point you'll run into one of these three situations:
- Your public traffic costs you so much to repeatedly process that it's cheaper to let some service cache the common responses instead. (Where the cache size is larger than anything you'd want to support yourself. For example, if it's <1G and survives your service restarts, you may want to do it yourself)
- Your customers on the other side of the world start complaining that the resources take ages to load.
- Someone floods you with enough traffic that you can't respond to real customers traffic anymore. You get a ransom email to pay them to stop. But there are enough groups doing that that paying is useless because someone else will try again in a few days. If you're providing a service where people pay you to use the website, you're losing money until you solve this problem.
Because an average request would have to travel half the globe, so setting up a simple HTTPS connection would already take a second. That's completely unacceptable for static content.
Not only would transfer be slow, they would also be much more pressing on the network as the request would occupy huge stretches and many interconnects and switches.
Furthermore, it hardens the website against DDoS and adds robustness for regional failures.
This article being down/slow is a great response.
The site this is about is current down due to HN traffic.
Lol
Depends on your use case.
If you have a very inefficient backend (maybe legacy project?), you have massive amount of traffic (say 100K req/s or above) or you really must have sub-500ms latency absolutely everywhere in the world, then it might make sense to slap a CDN (or similar) on top of that.
In pretty much any case outside of that, it makes no sense to waste the time, money or effort on CDNs. But, all the CDN companies seemingly have convinced half the internet that you absolutely must use a CDN, otherwise you'll get hacked/broke/killed/sent to the moon, and they've been successful with this campaign too seemingly.
Data scraping.
If anything else, the AI machine wants near constant streams of new data, even if it already checked with you 30ms ago.
A CDN helps immensely.
Also keeps you from getting DDoS'd if you did something like run it off your home connection.
Europe sucks at tech?
Well I’ll be damned.
I would’ve never expected that.
How did you extrapolate that leap of logic? Maybe we suck at business.
Yeah because it's priced well and it works. It's a no-brainer. (Also if it does go down, well so has everyone else so no big deal)
Also in this list of GOATed companies: Tailscale, Ubiquiti.