
Argo from Cloudflare – featuring Smart Routing and Tiered Cache - cemerick
https://blog.cloudflare.com/argo/
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Edmond
Akamai has had SureRoute and Tiered distribution for probably over a decade.

It would be nice if the HN front page can stop serving as Ad space for
CloudFlare.

~~~
tyingq
Not specific to HN, but if Akamai wants more buzz and discussion, all they
need to do is introduce some small/hobby level plans with up-front pricing and
no interaction with salespeople.

~~~
Edmond
That's a fair point...though the bar for Akamai is a lot higher than that of
CF as it relates to their customer base...let's just say when your clients
include some of the most renowned companies in the world, top US government
agencies, the US military...the people you let on your platform becomes a
matter of concern.

~~~
user5994461
The real barrier is the pricing. Don't bother talking to Akamai if you don't
have one million dollar.

Big companies, government and military are the only ones which can afford it.

They'd use a registration form too, if there were one.

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r1ch
The pricing model on this makes no sense. Argo claims to optimize the route
between Cloudflare and the origin, which is only used during cache misses, yet
they charge $0.10/gb for _all_ traffic from Cloudflare to visitors.

Considering most sites will be aiming for a high cache hit rate, I don't see
this being very attractive unless your user base is constantly logged in and
hitting your backend.

~~~
Edmond
Not all content can be cached,that's where optimal routing to origin provides
the most benefit...for instance if you're serving pages with PII after the
user logs in, you can't cache that on a CDN (you can do browser based private
caching though).

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tav
Any chance the Smart Routing would be available as a TCP/UDP proxy service? It
would be great to take advantage of Cloudflare's network without having to
hand over your SSL keys.

~~~
deno
> Because of our physical and virtual presence around the world, Cloudflare is
> uniquely positioned to rebuild the core of the Internet. Every customer we
> bring on increases the size of our [surveillance] network.

Google was founded by CIA[1]. There’s no way Cloudflare isn’t.

[1] [https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-
goo...](https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-
google-e836451a959e)

~~~
tyingq
>Google was founded by CIA[1]

The linked article does little to establish that, other than early Google got
some funding from NSF programs that were of interest to the CIA.

That's not unusual being that Sergey was a CS grad student at Stanford.
Cloudflare has a different history...it didn't sprout out of a university
project.

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billp34
has anyone moved their site to argo yet? i am looking for some benchmarks for
it. so far i found this site that did move to it and it sounds like they had a
little improvement, but no where near as much as cloudflare blog post leads us
to believe?

[https://www.rootusers.com/cloudflare-argo-
benchmark/](https://www.rootusers.com/cloudflare-argo-benchmark/)

if you have moved over plz let me know how if it has helped you.

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hashkb
Sounds very similar to how Fastly works.

~~~
foobarbazetc
The concept of symmetrical DSA is not new.

This is an accessible implementation that's more like Akamai SurePath as
Fastly doesn't (AFAIK) do route optimization or run premium backbone between
POPs.

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Coldewey
but it seems very similar to NP2 from datapath

