[MaxBarraclough]

> This should be tested periodically to ensure that your backends are able to scale & take the load without shedding due to the lack of CDN.

Are you thinking of a cloud-computing context here? Seems to me a lot hinges on this, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.

If so, this would answer the scale question, and would presumably translate into increased prices until the incident is over. (I'm assuming CloudFlare offer a cheaper solution than doing it yourself on a cloud.)

If not, and you own the physical capacity yourself, wouldn't you do away with CloudFlare entirely?

[chronid]

> If not, and you own the physical capacity yourself, wouldn't you do away with CloudFlare entirely?

Cost could be an issue. We had something similar (not in the same context) in a company I worked for before. We could shift traffic, but that would cost 2-3x more, so it was not the preferred path unless we had problems.

It surprises me that many (big) companies did not learn the lesson already. We had a similar thing happening already years ago with dyn in 2016 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Dyn_cyberattack), and it was surprising how many companies relied on a single DNS provider.

[MaxBarraclough]

Interesting, thanks. Didn't expect a CDN to win out on price against in-house capacity.

Presumably this is a function of scale? At a certain point it's going to be worth running your own CDN.

[jefftk]

Running your own CDN that is competitive with cloud flare and the other top CD ends requires dozens to hundreds of edge servers distributed around the world, close to your customers. This is very expensive, and while it does make sense for the very largest companies, almost everyone else is going to do better paying for a piece of large-scale shared infrastructure.