If you want to start an intense conversation in the halls of Cloudflare, try describing us as a "CDN". CDNs don't generally provide you with Load Balancing, they don't allow you to deploy Serverless Applications, and they certainly don't get installed onto your phone. One of the costs of that confusion is many people don't realize everything Cloudflare can do for people who want to operate in multiple public clouds, or want to operate in both the cloud and on their own hardware.

Load Balancing

Cloudflare has countless servers located in 180 data centers around the world. Each one is capable of acting as a Layer 7 load balancer, directing incoming traffic between origins wherever they may be. You could, for example, add load balancing between a set of machines you have in AWS' EC2, and another set you keep in Google Cloud.

This load balancing isn't just round-robining traffic. It supports weighting to allow you to control how much traffic goes to each cluster. It supports latency-based routing to automatically route traffic to the cluster which is closer (so adding geographic distribution can be as simple as spinning up machines). It even supports health checks, allowing it to automatically direct traffic to the cloud which is currently healthy.

Most importantly, it doesn't run in any of the provider's clouds and isn't dependent on them to function properly. Even better, since the load balancing runs near virtually every Internet user around the world it doesn't come at any performance cost. (Using our Argo technology performance often gets better!).

Argo Tunnel

One of the hardest components to managing a multi-cloud deployment is networking. Each provider has their own method of defining networks and firewalls, and even tools which can deploy clusters across multiple clouds often can't quite manage to get the networking configuration to work in the same way. The task of setting it up can often be a trial-and-error game where the final config is best never touched again, leaving 'going multi-cloud' as a failed experiment within organizations.

At Cloudflare we have a technology called Argo Tunnel which flips networking on its head. Rather than opening ports and directing incoming traffic, each of your virtual machines (or k8s pods) makes outbound tunnels to the nearest Cloudflare PoPs. All of your Internet traffic then flows over those tunnels. You keep all your ports closed to inbound traffic, and never have to think about Internet networking again.

What's so powerful about this configuration is is makes it trivial to spin up machines in new locations. Want a dozen machines in Australia? As long as they start the Argo Tunnel daemon they will start receiving traffic. Don't need them any more? Shut them down and the traffic will be routed elsewhere. And, of course, none of this relies on any one public cloud provider, making it reliable even if they should have issues.

Argo Tunnel makes it trivial to add machines in new clouds, or to keep machines on-prem even as you start shifting workloads into the Cloud.

Access Control

One thing you'll realize about using Argo Tunnel is you now have secure tunnels which connect your infrastructure with Cloudflare's network. Once traffic reaches that network, it doesn't necessarily have to flow directly to your machines. It could, for example, have access control applied where we use your Identity Provider (like Okta or Active Directory) to decide who should be able to access what. Rather than wrestling with VPCs and VPN configurations, you can move to a zero-trust model where you use policies to decide exactly who can access what on a per-request basis.

In fact, you can now do this with SSH as well! You can manage all your user accounts in a single place and control with precision who can access which piece of infrastructure, irrespective of which cloud it's in.

Our Reliability

No computer system is perfect, and ours is no exception. We make mistakes, have bugs in our code, and deal with the pain of operating at the scale of the Internet every day. One great innovation in the recent history of computers, however, is the idea that it is possible to build a reliable system on top of many individually unreliable components.

Each of Cloudflare's PoPs is designed to function without communication or support from others, or from a central data center. That alone greatly increases our tolerance for network partitions and moves us from maintaining a single system to be closer to maintaining 180 independent clouds, any of which can serve all traffic.

We are also a system built on anycast which allows us to tap into the fundamental reliability of the Internet. The Internet uses a protocol called BGP which asks each system who would like to receive traffic for a particular IP address to 'advertise' it. Each router then will decide to forward traffic based on which person advertising an address is the closest. We advertise all of our IP addresses in every one of our data centers. If a data centers goes down, it stops advertising BGP routes, and the very same packets which would have been destined for it arrive in another PoP seamlessly.

Ultimately we are trying to help build a better Internet. We don't believe that Internet is built on the back of a single provider. Many of the services provided by these cloud providers are simply too complex to be as reliable as the Internet demands.

True reliability and cost control both require existing on multiple clouds. It is clear that the tools which the Internet of the 80s and 90s gave us may be insufficient to move into that future. With a smarter network we can do more, better.