Also, a CDN which routes all of your traffic via DNS can also take advantage of a private network to get the packets to your users faster, i.e. Cloudflare could potentially own a faster link between Virginia and Berlin than the public internet would take, and lower response time that way. I think that's what point two on the benefits list here is about: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-is-now-a-google-cloud...
My rough and uninformed impression is that for small-time users, where "small-time" includes the scale of Reddit, CloudFlare can do what Akamai does at a much more reasonable price.
But yes, that's a different sense of "CDN" from e.g. Google-hosted jQuery.
Not really. Akamai has presence inside many "too big to peer" networks, while CloudFlare doesn't (for now).
You can't just compare CloudFlare to Akamai at the moment, they are following very different strategies.
Is there something that Akamai can do that CloudFlare cant?
Both services seem to be highly available and very fast from around the world. What does Akamai do here that's better?
To provide an example: transit to DTAG via GTT (CloudFlare) is always saturated at peak hours. So Akamai has a big advantage (direct connection) if you want to reach Deutsche Telekom customers.
Do you know of any docs describing the algorithm Akamai or CloudFlare use to decide whether to hit your origin server? I'm a stickler for correctness but it seems to be pretty easy to get into the situation where your users aren't getting what you intended. HTTP cache headers are a mess.
To me it seems safer to code your application so the HTML points to JS/CSS/PNG with content hashes in the URL. Then you don't have any cache expiry issues -- nothing ever expires, but you control the assets exactly through your dynamic HTML.
I think it's important to have fast and reliable rollbacks. You can imagine some situation where private content or offensive text is accidentally included with some static asset... I would like some guarantee about when users stop seeing it (preferably as soon as the application is redeployed).
And most likely default to not caching if they are unable to determine.
For dynamic pages you can tell them which ones can be safely cached with PageRules (on paid plans): https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172826-C...
So I guess the selling point of CloudFlare is that it's like a normal CDN, plus it offers security services like DDOS protection?
With a normal CDN, you don't change your DNS to point at their servers right? DNS points to your server, but you change your code to have <img src="" > and so forth pointing at their servers. To me that just seems a lot less invasive, but admittedly then you can't get the security features.