I spent some time on Friday trying out Cloudflare tunnel and boy was it a bad experience. The big killer was that the tunnel endpoint they gave me had an IPv6-only endpoint that I'm not sure was even valid. None of my devices could connect to it, including macbook, phone, linux, AWS instance...
On top of that I keep running into unexpected roadblocks with Cloudflare, like when I was trying to set up the tunnel they required me to set up a dedicated domain, you can't set up a subdomain of an existing domain. Probably fine if you are rolling it out as a production service, but for just testing it to make sure it even works (see IPv6 comments above), I just wanted to set it up as a subdomain.
We were also super frustrated with Cloudflare Tunnel, especially from a developer experience and firewall perspective. So we built Tunlr to replace it: https://tunlr.dev. It's Cloudflare Tunnels but you can self-host it and provide your own domains for your internal developers to use, and it proxies over HTTP/SSE which plays nicely with firewalls.
Works great for me, 5 subdomains coming to various ports on my dev pc for whatever project I'm testing (8000 for laravel, 3000 for nextjs). Way better than ngrok.
It was a smooth experience for me. Just start the cloudflared container with the provided key in the environment and you are done.
I also don't have ipv6 but it is not required and if I remember correctly I did not have to specify any endpoints, just the key.
I'd tend to agree with that, but I was able to find some youtube videos of people setting them up. It was still a little bit of a challenge though because they have moved the menus all around in the last few months, so even the most recent videos I could fine were pointing to locations that didn't exist and I had to go hunting for them.
I would have preferred to just use tailscale for this, but we are using headscale and want to make a service available to our sister company, that doesn't have e-mails in our Google Workgroup where we have the OIDC for auth, so they can't be part of our tailnet without buying them logins or setting up accounts in keycloak or similar.
We're using Cloudflare Zero Trust quite extensively, and I find them quite easy to use. Works perfectly from AWS as well, all their endpoints have both IPv4 and IPv6 IPs.
Maybe the tunnel they provisioned for me was just broken, because:
$ host -t A 9c8855f1-e47f-47bf-9e0e-66938be0f076.cfargotunnel.com
9c8855f1-e47f-47bf-9e0e-66938be0f076.cfargotunnel.com has no A record
$ host -t AAAA 9c8855f1-e47f-47bf-9e0e-66938be0f076.cfargotunnel.com
9c8855f1-e47f-47bf-9e0e-66938be0f076.cfargotunnel.com has IPv6 address fd10:aec2:5dae::
$ telnet -6 9c8855f1-e47f-47bf-9e0e-66938be0f076.cfargotunnel.com 443
Trying fd10:aec2:5dae::...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection timed out
I got the cloudflared running fairly easily (though their Debian package repo seemed broken and they didn't have an option listed on the setup page for downloading just the binary, I was able to find it after some searching). That part went smoothly, I just couldn't connect to the tunnel they provisioned.
Haven't used Cloudflare in a while, but in the past you needed $200/month Business plan to be able to use subdomains of an existing domain with DNS hosted elsewhere.
Nah, I'm free tier. I register domains through them and I think I pay around $10/month for R2 storage. All kinds of other freebies come on that tier, D1 databases (sqlite), Workers (think Lambda)
Tunneling isn't that big of a toll on resource, it doesn't require storage/disk space nor compute power (CPU chips), all it needs is ingress/egress (spare bandwidth). A non-profit or decent business in telco can easily offer it, consider that many hosting companies offer entire package in free tier today (compute + disk + egress).
For several years, ngrok was practically free, only recently they've started monetizing once it gained popularity.
I use it with a separate docker compose project so everything lives inside that (with traefik) and it's been utterly bulletproof for years - took a little puzzling out to start with but otherwise no drama and lets me do foo-whatever.mydomain.co.uk and route publically which is fantastic for local dev stuff or where I want to test something on iphone/android easily or share it - keeps all that stuff out of my "stack" for dev projects which makes for a very fast spinup if I want to test something.
That really sums up the cloudflare experience and this is from someone heavily invested in their workers platform. They have lots of products and keep pumping more but except for DNS, most of them are half assed with weak maintenance/support.
That's not a fair take. I will give Cloudflare a lot of shit for some of their products, but some of their products are 100% best in class. For instance, R2 is just better than S3, and KV is better than AWS/GCP options. The pricing is better, it's multi-region by default and there's less ops overhead.
This is good to know. I haven't used R2, it's been on my radar but I haven't taken the steps to start using it. Partly because my experience with the rest of Cloudflare has been middling to poor. I'd love to save on our S3 bill, which is substantial, but it's going to take significant development to get there and it's an unknown how much it'll actually save. There are too many stories of people getting called by enterprise sales when their usage crosses some line in the sand that only the sales people know.
I agree with R2 but KV is un-realiable. I said DNS but I meant CDN which R2 kind of falls into. Cloudflare is good in moving lots of data but most of their other products are not polished. It doesn't mean that they are not exceptional products. I have deployed a wasm-worker 5 years ago and it is still up and running to this day. I don't think a server would have survived or any other product from any other provider would have guaranteed such backward compatibility.
A proprietary project. I was surprised to realize how little interest I have in these things anymore. I mean genuinely surprised. I suppose I have just seen so many large-corporation-does-something in isolation projects that I make two possibly wrong assumptions.
1) It will never work
2) The article is just advertising. Jobs, products whatever.
There is a third conclusion which is worrisome. That the leadership of the organization just doesn't get it.
I'm not advocating these as correct, just wondering if other readers share my instantaneous reaction of been-there, seen-that, know-how-it-ends.
Although Oxy is a closed, internal project, seems like they released part of it under a BSD license. Not the networking part, but a Rust library to create "production-grade systems".
Outside of HPC/HFT most people will never need kernel bypass. If you just got off Nginx you probably have years of optimizations left to do. (Username checks out though.)
Isn't this the point of upvoting though - if people find it interesting and new, they will upvote and stuff will be visible.
I also think HN does some sort of deduplication if something has been posted recently (to count as upvote instead of new submission), but not sure of the details.
> Although Pingora, another proxy server developed by us in Rust, shares some similarities with Oxy, it was intentionally designed as a separate proxy server with a different objective.
Oxy actually means sharp or acidic in greek. Oxygen was wrongly named like that (acid former) because it was thought to be the element to give acids their sourness but later many acids without oxygen were discovered. The key turned out to be hydrogen not oxygen
Yup, here I am on the other side of the world and that was the first thing it reminds me of. The link to Rust is... remote, and I have to think a lot :D
I know it because of movies and books... so can we trust a "next generation proxy framework" by people who don't go out, don't read and don't watch culture things? The name is similar in other languages too..
The implication of being too nerdy would be that they are extremely well-versed in fantasy, science fiction and/or anime as well as random niche topics. They would probably read or watch way more culture things than you or me, just the kind that deals with current societal issues by allegory and thus wouldn't use real-world street names for drugs
Not that I think that that's a fair conclusion to jump through. Occam's razor would prefer "they were probably vaguely aware and didn't care". Just like how Torvalds knowingly named git after a slang word for a stupid person
I spent some time on Friday trying out Cloudflare tunnel and boy was it a bad experience. The big killer was that the tunnel endpoint they gave me had an IPv6-only endpoint that I'm not sure was even valid. None of my devices could connect to it, including macbook, phone, linux, AWS instance...
On top of that I keep running into unexpected roadblocks with Cloudflare, like when I was trying to set up the tunnel they required me to set up a dedicated domain, you can't set up a subdomain of an existing domain. Probably fine if you are rolling it out as a production service, but for just testing it to make sure it even works (see IPv6 comments above), I just wanted to set it up as a subdomain.
We were also super frustrated with Cloudflare Tunnel, especially from a developer experience and firewall perspective. So we built Tunlr to replace it: https://tunlr.dev. It's Cloudflare Tunnels but you can self-host it and provide your own domains for your internal developers to use, and it proxies over HTTP/SSE which plays nicely with firewalls.
Works great for me, 5 subdomains coming to various ports on my dev pc for whatever project I'm testing (8000 for laravel, 3000 for nextjs). Way better than ngrok.
It was a smooth experience for me. Just start the cloudflared container with the provided key in the environment and you are done. I also don't have ipv6 but it is not required and if I remember correctly I did not have to specify any endpoints, just the key.
We spent 3 days trying to properly integrate their tunnels to our internal network. I took us 3 hours to integrate tailscale.
Tunnels are poorly documented.
>Tunnels are poorly documented.
I'd tend to agree with that, but I was able to find some youtube videos of people setting them up. It was still a little bit of a challenge though because they have moved the menus all around in the last few months, so even the most recent videos I could fine were pointing to locations that didn't exist and I had to go hunting for them.
I would have preferred to just use tailscale for this, but we are using headscale and want to make a service available to our sister company, that doesn't have e-mails in our Google Workgroup where we have the OIDC for auth, so they can't be part of our tailnet without buying them logins or setting up accounts in keycloak or similar.
We're using Cloudflare Zero Trust quite extensively, and I find them quite easy to use. Works perfectly from AWS as well, all their endpoints have both IPv4 and IPv6 IPs.
Maybe the tunnel they provisioned for me was just broken, because:
I got the cloudflared running fairly easily (though their Debian package repo seemed broken and they didn't have an option listed on the setup page for downloading just the binary, I was able to find it after some searching). That part went smoothly, I just couldn't connect to the tunnel they provisioned.Haven't used Cloudflare in a while, but in the past you needed $200/month Business plan to be able to use subdomains of an existing domain with DNS hosted elsewhere.
Nah, I'm free tier. I register domains through them and I think I pay around $10/month for R2 storage. All kinds of other freebies come on that tier, D1 databases (sqlite), Workers (think Lambda)
localtunnel[1] is one good option, at least for now.
[1] https://localtunnel.github.io/www/
I don't really get how the developer can run the project free of charge without monetization options. Does this solely rely on donors?
Tunneling isn't that big of a toll on resource, it doesn't require storage/disk space nor compute power (CPU chips), all it needs is ingress/egress (spare bandwidth). A non-profit or decent business in telco can easily offer it, consider that many hosting companies offer entire package in free tier today (compute + disk + egress).
For several years, ngrok was practically free, only recently they've started monetizing once it gained popularity.
Gotta say, this is amazing, exactly what I needed.
I use it with a separate docker compose project so everything lives inside that (with traefik) and it's been utterly bulletproof for years - took a little puzzling out to start with but otherwise no drama and lets me do foo-whatever.mydomain.co.uk and route publically which is fantastic for local dev stuff or where I want to test something on iphone/android easily or share it - keeps all that stuff out of my "stack" for dev projects which makes for a very fast spinup if I want to test something.
That really sums up the cloudflare experience and this is from someone heavily invested in their workers platform. They have lots of products and keep pumping more but except for DNS, most of them are half assed with weak maintenance/support.
That's not a fair take. I will give Cloudflare a lot of shit for some of their products, but some of their products are 100% best in class. For instance, R2 is just better than S3, and KV is better than AWS/GCP options. The pricing is better, it's multi-region by default and there's less ops overhead.
This is good to know. I haven't used R2, it's been on my radar but I haven't taken the steps to start using it. Partly because my experience with the rest of Cloudflare has been middling to poor. I'd love to save on our S3 bill, which is substantial, but it's going to take significant development to get there and it's an unknown how much it'll actually save. There are too many stories of people getting called by enterprise sales when their usage crosses some line in the sand that only the sales people know.
I agree with R2 but KV is un-realiable. I said DNS but I meant CDN which R2 kind of falls into. Cloudflare is good in moving lots of data but most of their other products are not polished. It doesn't mean that they are not exceptional products. I have deployed a wasm-worker 5 years ago and it is still up and running to this day. I don't think a server would have survived or any other product from any other provider would have guaranteed such backward compatibility.
R2 is very high latency with huge variance, definitely lower quality than S3.
In my experience even backblaze b2 performs (way) better.
Their community forums are full of such reports.
KV is so expensive that it’s barely usable, and like R2, is very slow.
Slightly higher latency. I've seen about 20-30% increase from S3 to R2. But the bill is magnitudes lower.
Agree with the KV point, Upstash is the same. But I just use dragonflydb on a single VM. No point paying for transactions.
Hell, S3 could have 20ms latency and it wouldn't matter since I can't afford it.
A proprietary project. I was surprised to realize how little interest I have in these things anymore. I mean genuinely surprised. I suppose I have just seen so many large-corporation-does-something in isolation projects that I make two possibly wrong assumptions.
1) It will never work 2) The article is just advertising. Jobs, products whatever.
There is a third conclusion which is worrisome. That the leadership of the organization just doesn't get it.
I'm not advocating these as correct, just wondering if other readers share my instantaneous reaction of been-there, seen-that, know-how-it-ends.
Although Oxy is a closed, internal project, seems like they released part of it under a BSD license. Not the networking part, but a Rust library to create "production-grade systems".
https://github.com/cloudflare/foundations
Interesting. No mention of kernel bypass, which Cloudflare was also discussing in 2023-2024.
Outside of HPC/HFT most people will never need kernel bypass. If you just got off Nginx you probably have years of optimizations left to do. (Username checks out though.)
There should be a political party for people who use opcode mnemonics as their nicknames or domain names.
So why is this surfacing again now and why not a up to date article on Oxy? Which sounds very useful btw.
There are always people who haven't heard about stuff. https://xkcd.com/1053/
Surely you're not saying that everyone should just start posting all of cloudflare's blog posts? Let alone all blog posts on the net.
So, what's the threshold for what should be shared, given that most people don't know most thing things...?
Isn't this the point of upvoting though - if people find it interesting and new, they will upvote and stuff will be visible.
I also think HN does some sort of deduplication if something has been posted recently (to count as upvote instead of new submission), but not sure of the details.
People can submit anything they want. If it’s interesting, it’ll get upvoted. If not, it’ll not reach the front page.
Isn’t that the whole benefit of sites like HN and Reddit?
(2023)
Oxy sounds cool, but proprietary stuff is a hard pass for me. Just give me open-source any day.
Another un-google-able (OXY as in Occidental Petroleum Corp?) name for a Rust project. We just cannot help ourselves.
You google "Rust oxy proxy" and the first like 10 hits are Cloudflare's blog about it, a few HN posts.....
seems fine to me?
The article states that it's a proprietary project
How does it compare to Pangora?
The linked blog post has an entire section about that:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-oxy/#relation-to
> Although Pingora, another proxy server developed by us in Rust, shares some similarities with Oxy, it was intentionally designed as a separate proxy server with a different objective.
Is it the same thing? Perhaps oxy was later renamed to pingora?
clever name
What does it mean ?
Oxy actually means sharp or acidic in greek. Oxygen was wrongly named like that (acid former) because it was thought to be the element to give acids their sourness but later many acids without oxygen were discovered. The key turned out to be hydrogen not oxygen
An informal nickname for the opioid Oxycodone
Or a reference to oxidation, the process by which rust is formed…
And also prOXY. Works in many levels.
Or simply oxygen.
or oxytocin
or oxymoron
unfortunate name
Only in America
Unfortunately not (only)
Not only, but the opioid crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_...) is still something pretty specific to the United States, so you can't automatically assume that developers from other countries (I'm going by the author's name here because I wasn't able to find other information about him) will be familiar with the street names of various opioids...
Yup, here I am on the other side of the world and that was the first thing it reminds me of. The link to Rust is... remote, and I have to think a lot :D
What does it mean ?
Short for oxycodone, a drug abused by addicts.
They were too nerdy to think that way (or even know the street drug names).
I know it because of movies and books... so can we trust a "next generation proxy framework" by people who don't go out, don't read and don't watch culture things? The name is similar in other languages too..
The implication of being too nerdy would be that they are extremely well-versed in fantasy, science fiction and/or anime as well as random niche topics. They would probably read or watch way more culture things than you or me, just the kind that deals with current societal issues by allegory and thus wouldn't use real-world street names for drugs
Not that I think that that's a fair conclusion to jump through. Occam's razor would prefer "they were probably vaguely aware and didn't care". Just like how Torvalds knowingly named git after a slang word for a stupid person
Sure, those things are orthogonal to each other.
ah, the duality of man.
Stopped reading at proprietary. Seriously why would I care tying my app to something proprietary and have no way out of it?
What makes you think you can download it and use it yourself? This is just CloudFlare discussing their internal tech stack.