So I currently rent data center space which includes 100Mbps (95th%) on a 1Gbit drop in a full rack with 4kW of power for about $500/month. Interconnects within the building (an IX where CloudFlare resides) I think cost maybe $100 a month or in that range.<p>Since CloudFlare apparently doesn’t charge for peering, does that mean I can rent the fiber for $100/mo and get a interconnect into CloudFlare’s backbone, and gain access to publically routable unmetered 10GBe with my own IP cloaked behind CloudFlare?<p>Obviously at some point they have to charge for bandwidth, maybe I’m just wildly misunderstanding the offering, but where does pricing come in?
> We have had an open peering policy for years with any network and will continue to abide by that policy<p>FTA, didn't know this... explains how they took over the world though
I can see how this can be quite successful. On the one hand, private interconnect from your DC to a nearby Cloudflare PoP can be cheaper per Mbps or Gbps of bandwidth provisioned and hence can help reduce your overall network bandwidth costs. But on the other hand, you have to pay Cloudflare for their services and since they are bundling a lot of complex services they can justify charging a lot more than what a typical ISP's fees per Mbps of Internet would be.<p>If they succeed in attracting a lot customers to ride on their private network across any geography, over time their network will have the same jitter performance issues like Internet. If they grow too big, then they would have effectively privatized large parts of the Internet. That cannot be good for anyone.
I really love this offering and I don't think it gets enough attention. We are an on-prem company and we use CloudFlare. Our users pay for that latency (in time) for us to traverse our IP providers to get to a CF pop. Since all our traffic goes over CF, directly connecting makes a lot more sense. I'm going to investigate further for the latency benefits.<p>I've also backhauled lots of IP over the years and it can be a real pain. Fiber cuts are common, keeping redundant wave service or dark fiber drives up the cost, and in the end, its often cheaper to hand off to an IP providers meshed network, then to backhaul any distance for latency.
Due to the focus on security, I'm curious about customer isolation here. When you do interconnect with a cloud provider, it's traditionally into a VPC. Does cloudflare have a similar concept in play?<p>How, for example, am I prevented from setting up a CDN configuration and/or EdgeWorker that talks to someone else's "private" (or non-internet routable) IP addresses? From the article it sounds like edge nodes have routeability to them, so is there some additional layer of packet encapsulation/tagging or something performed by proxy server?
An image on the page has some weird text that seems to say milliseconds-squared: "The variation in delay of received packets (or jitter) decreased from 82.9ms² to 0.3ms²". Maybe they are quoting variance instead of standard deviation?
Remember: Cloudflare has been loosing millions of dollars each year they existed.<p><a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519222176/d735023ds1.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...</a><p><i>"As we continue to invest in our business, we have incurred net losses of $17.3 million, $10.7 million, and $87.2 million for 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively. For the six months ended June 30, 2018 and 2019, our revenue increased from $87.1 million to $129.2 million, an increase of 48%, and we incurred net losses of $32.5 million and $36.8 million, respectively. "</i><p>The fact that they are injecting themselves into more and more basic internet infrastructure is genuinely scary.