
Argo and the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone - jgrahamc
https://blog.cloudflare.com/argo-and-the-cloudflare-global-private-backbone/?a
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matsur
I’m the product manager for Argo and author of the blog. Happy to answer any
questions!

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devy
Is Argo open sourced? If not, will it be open sourced in the future?

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eastdakota
Rustam can weigh in here, but I'm not exactly sure what with Argo we'd open
source. Argo is a collection of a bunch of different technologies that we use
to measure the performance across our transit, peering, and backbone
connections. We then send different requests down different paths depending on
each customer's particular needs and settings. While I'd imagine we will open
source parts of the overall system, there's not really a stand-alone package
that we could make available for anyone else to use.

If there's a particular part of the overall Argo that would be helpful for you
or others, let us know and we'll certainly consider it. Here's a list of
things we've built at Cloudflare and open sourced already:
[https://cloudflare.github.io/](https://cloudflare.github.io/)

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danpalmer
> As an example, here’s a measurement of jitter (variance in round trip time)
> between two of our data centers, Chicago and Newark, over a transit
> provider’s network... Average jitter over the pictured 6 hours is 4ms, with
> average round trip latency of 27ms.

> Here’s the same jitter chart between Chicago and Newark, except this time,
> transiting the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone... Here we see a jitter
> measurement of 536μs (microseconds), almost eight times better than the
> measurement over a transit provider between the same two sites.

This is really impressive. Will be interesting to see what's possible when
network roundtrips are 2 orders of magnitude more stable.

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napsterbr
Argo is great. I temporarily switched on on a customer's domain and we saw
50+% improvements on latency!

Question to CF employees, since they usually participate here on HN: Any
chance we are ever going to be able to enable Argo on specific domains /
paths, similar to Workers?

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johnklos
Seems more like a sales pitch than anything which conveys real information.
And, as they imply (but others posting here dispute), if it's better in all
cases, why wouldn't it be on in all cases? Why didn't they mention the
downsides to enabling it?

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jgrahamc
There are two parts here:

1\. We've started using our own backbone of fibre links to carry traffic.

2\. The Argo product for route optimization and working around Internet
problems.

#2 can take advantage of #1 now that it exists. #2 is a paid product.

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andersonrkton
Stopped using Argo Tunnel because it didn`t work well inside Brazil... we had
a huge % of requests to our API behind the tunnel not being completed.

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tmikaeld
I think this is an ongoing problem for any provider, can be bad local peering
or even ISP ddos protections kicking in.

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wcunning
I'm curious if this conflicts with the Argo AI trademark. Does anyone have any
insight into how the similarity would be determined? Specifically, I'm
thinking that routing and self driving cars are near enough to cause some
confusion.

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bogomipz
This looks like little more than marketing fluff and with rather confusing
messaging at that. For example the post states:

>"One specific example of Argo’s smarts is its ability to distinguish between
multiple potential connectivity options as it leaves a given data center. We
call this “transit selection”

A "global private backbone" and edge routing have zero to do with each other.
They are orthogonal. You can "pref" your transit provider's customer routes
from just within POP itself. This has zero to do with whether or not you have
a "backbone." The way this works is that you pick your top N destination ASNs
and continuously monitor ping time, jitter packet loss etc. Then you prefer
the more desirable routes via iBGP. This is not new and not innovative either.
Internap has been this 20 for years now. This was the whole "secret sauce" of
their PNAP architecture back in the day. In fact they even sold a hardware
device to do it called the Internap FCP(flow control platform)it has since
been named MIRO [1][2]. Of course many people do exactly this themselves with
BIRD/Quagga/Exabgp and some Python. And you certainly don't need "machine
learning" to do this.

As a CDN customer I only care about getting the best path from the POP back to
the eyeball networks. Why would it matter whether the CDN provider has fiber
between two of their POPs? There should be enough transit diversity at each
edge location that fiber between POPs is irrelevant. I should spend as little
time on the CDN provider's network as possible i.e "hot potato" routing. This
is the whole value proposition of a CDN. Honestly this whole sounds like a
cost savings mechanism that they've trying to spin and sell as a product
innovation.

Also where is the Cloudflare backbone map? It seems to be conspicuously absent
for announcement about a "global private backbone." How many route miles are
there? Is it an actual backbone or this just some CWDM gear that only connects
POPs in the same city over municipal fiber?

[1] [https://www.inap.com/press-release/internap-rebuilds-
patente...](https://www.inap.com/press-release/internap-rebuilds-patented-
routing-software-content-delivery-network-optimize-traffic-delivery-todays-
internet-applications/)

[2]
[https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20080206005468/en/Tel...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20080206005468/en/Teliax-
Deploys-Internaps-Flow-Control-Platform-FCP)

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lgats
Too bad it costs $5 + $0.10 per GB.

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jgrahamc
We provide a lot of value for free through our free service. Argo is an
additional paid service that improves performance for customers that want to
pay for that.

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Avamander
Your free service is nice - except that you can't use CF as a registrar for
more than one domain without also having to pay for the proxying (even if
there's no need). I'd gladly put all my eggs in one basket instead of having
them spread out across five different registrars if that were fixed. Though
maybe it's by-design?

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judge2020
Not sure I understand "pay for the proxying" \- you should still be able to
sign up your domains with the "free" plan as long as you use CF as your dns.
If you don't want to proxy, your DNS records can be set to grey clouds so it
just acts as a DNS service (but yes, you do have to be on Cloudflare's
nameservers for now).

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whitepoplar
Are there any plans for allowing customers to use Cloudflare Registrar without
Cloudflare DNS?

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ebrown_cf
At this time we don't have any plans to open up the Registrar to domains not
using Cloudflare's DNS. If that changes in the future we'll be sure to
announce it.

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whitepoplar
Is there any benefit to having critical domains registered _and_ DNSed at
Cloudflare as opposed to using a separate registar w/ Cloudflare's DNS? The
benefit of the latter is that one has optionality of DNS providers, and
additionally one can use DNS providers that support zone export for secondary
DNS.

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judge2020
One-click DNSSEC I guess.

