Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.
$20
per month
F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect is a solution used to more easily and securely network across public clouds, hybrid clouds, and edge sites via an agile SaaS-based service. Users can rapidly connect instances deployed across multiple cloud regions and/or different cloud providers using Distributed Cloud Network Connect and its automated provisioning, integrated service stack, and end-to-end visibility. Cloud instances will be connected in minutes and always visible for rapid troubleshooting.
Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.
F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect Would be incredibly useful when having to juggle multiple cloud providers. Also XC would be fantastic for standardization and consistency of the whole networking stack. It may be less useful for incredibly specialized cases where very specific traffic manipulation is needed. Any use-cases with heavy APM usage would have to be carefully considered as those features didn’t make it into XC yet.
Registrar and DNS services are impeccable, with registrations done at cost and without ADs. DNS services setting standards for speed of resolution.
DDOS protection. With their content distribution network to back them they have the bandwidth and tools to be both proactive and reactive to bad actors.
WAF - Their Web Application Firewall helps mitigate common site vulnerabilities and has active zero-day protection running for breaking exploits
In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.
The support model needs a quite a bit of work. I personally have experienced an outage on the platform. due to mis-configureation Although the outage was due to engineer error it took over 2 hours before we were able to speak to an engineer
Proxy v2 protocol to allow our organization to capture and view the source IP address
Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
F5 Distributed Cloud Network additionally interconnects our cloud improving our security and creating secure IPsec SSL tunnels between our clouds, improving the page load of the application published in the Load balancer in Distributed cloud, and additionally adding a security layer easy to implement with the WAF for all web applications in our company
I have only used their support a few times, and most times, they are responsive and able to resolve my issue with a minimal amount of time and effort. However, there was one instance where I simply asked about how to purchase some more resources (redirect rules), and I received some type of automated/AI response that was very unhelpful and gave me no opportunity to escalate to a person.
Nothing like it. Organizations can utilize these Cloudflare products to enhance their online presence by improving security, performance, reliability, and developer efficiency. Cloudflare is an American company that delivers services such as DNS, a content delivery network (CDN), and various other additional services to make websites faster and more secure. Cloudflare is used by over 26 million sites, resulting in the processing of more than 1 billion IP addresses each day.
This software as a service (SaaS) links, divides, and protects network traffic over one or more edge sites, data centers, and public clouds. It offers the adaptability needed to operate across many transit choices, such as the F5 Global Network, private corporate networks, and cloud provider linkages. Additionally, faster time to resolution and more effective issue management are achieved by end-to-end monitoring and troubleshooting.
We have seen reduced usage and downtimes after using Cloudflare for Caching. This has already yielded ROI as minimal downtime ensures consistent user traffic and increases revenue.
It can handle significant traffic spikes and shields the website from DDOS attacks. We have prevented a number of DDOS attacks after using Cloudflare and hence we are already seeing an ROI by using it.
Some of the integrations with Cloudflare are really painful and we have faced a lot of issues because of not having native integrations to certain 3rd party apps.
