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Using Cloudflare as a CDN – a review

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Recently one of our clients was experiencing an increase in site downtime. During our investigation of the outage incidents we discovered that the site was increasingly becoming a victim of DOS (denial of service) attacks.

From the data we looked at it appeared the ‘hacker’ would trawl the site, honing in on pages which had the longest response times and then repeatedly hit those pages with requests using up resources on the site and eventually causing the CPU on the database to max out and the site to go down.

Our client hosts with Rackspace who offer a security solution so we asked them for pricing.  They suggested that their managed service would be rather expensive  for our needs and recommended we take a look at Cloudflare.

Cloudflare offers a low cost (entry level plans are free) Content Delivery Network which enables you to save bandwidth and reduce requests to your server by caching some content. In addition (and this was the feature we were most interested in), Cloudflare offers built in security protection to guard against DOS attacks.

Both the caching and security settings are highly configurable through an easy to use interface, help documentation is clear and well written and support is good (support tickets are prioritised according to the plan you’re on – support for clients on paid plans get priority over those on free plans which seems fair).

Cloudflare is amazingly simple and low risk to implement. The most simple way is to simply delegate the top level domain DNS e.g. example.com to Cloudflare who take over the management of your Zone file. You can then choose which of your zone file entries you want to send through Cloudflare and which you don’t. You can set Cloudflare up ready to go with all services in ‘pause’ mode which means when your DNS does initially point to them they don’t do anything other than relay requests.

If you (or your IT department) aren’t happy to delegate the entire DNS for your domain (maybe you have internal systems running on that domain) then it is possible to get a CNAME record setup by Cloudflare for a sub domain e.g. http://www.example.com. This is the route we needed to go down for our client and this option does require you to be on a paid for plan (we went for Business at $200 per website per month).

The steps we followed for implementing Cloudflare were as follows:

1) Setup Cloudflare account and add card details for paid for plan
2) Requested CNAME record from Cloudflare support (we got this in 24 hours)
3) Given a TXT record from Cloudflare to add to the DNS for our example.com domain to allow them to take control
4) When that was done, Cloudflare gave us a CNAME record for the DNS record
5) Client reduced the TTL on the domain
6) We setup all the configuration of the http://www.example.com domain in Cloudflare but set it to ‘pause’
7) Client added the CNAME record to the DNS and once we’d waiting for the TTL to expire we did a tracert to see that we were actually pointing at Cloudflare
8) We then did the cool bit which was pressing the ‘unpause’ button and sending users through the CDN

We gave the site a smoke test and everything seemed to be working as expected. During the day we then proceed to ‘tune’ Cloudflare by gradually turning on the various options that allow you to cache static content (Cloudflare provide a handy list of file extensions it sees as ‘static’ files and you can use page rules to bypass these or to cache more file types).

Each time we made a change we checked the site and made sure everything looked OK before making the next change. We also checked that real traffic wasn’t being blocked by looking at Google Analytics to ensure there wasn’t a sudden drop in activity and asking Rackspace to ensure that all Cloudflare IP addresses (again there’s a useful list) were whitelisted.

At the end of the first couple of days of using Cloudflare we had enough data to see that it was making a difference. It had saved lots of requests (almost 50% of all requests were coming from Cloudflare cache) and had blocked over 100 threats (with the security setting on ‘low’).

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dashboard1

The website ‘felt’ much, much faster from a user perspective although our external monitoring wasn’t reflecting this which somewhat confused us. This must be something Cloudflare get asked about on a regular basis and they give a very clear response to this at http://blog.cloudflare.com/ttfb-time-to-first-byte-considered-meaningles/.

So the site was faster, we were blocking some hacking attempts, we were saving bandwidth all looked good. However we looked at IIS logs and could see that we were still getting some bad http requests (PROFIND, COOK, OPTIONS requests for non-existent URLs) and attempts to do some XSS and SQL injection. Our site/code was rejecting these requests as our IIS filters and security settings meant the hackers weren’t getting anywhere but we ideally didn’t want these requests hitting our server at all and wanted Cloudflare to catch and block them.

We then took advantage of the Cloudflare WAF (Web Application Firewall) and this is now blocking most of the ‘dodgy’ looking requests we’ve seen in our IIS logs. We’ve raised a support ticket with Cloudflare support about the few remaining dodgy requests and they’ve responded very promptly to say they will add a WAF rule to block those. If they come through on that promise we’ll be very happy.

wafrules

All in all, Cloudflare appears to deliver on it’s promises, is incredibly easy to setup and configure and support seems good.  There are lots of options we’ve not explored yet such as using their API to automatically clear the cache on a publish from Sitecore which would enable us to cache more than static content.  For a relatively low cost it certainly seems to offer a good alternative to Akamai.



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