rack-reverse-proxy VS flow-pipeline

At Kactus, we are a Ruby and Rails shop using Heroku to host our applications and thus we do not have access to the web server configuration. When the problem arised approximately 4 years ago - at the time of this writing - we didn't have many options apart from reverse proxying from the application server directly. We used a Ruby gem called rack-reverse-proxy which implements a Rack middleware used to proxy requests to a foreign service.

Many Thanks to Cloudflare and dev.to for giving us this opportunity.

Unlike other providers in this list, Cloudflare is not just a serverless database platform. Instead, it’s a cloud connectivity platform that provides several web services. It’s one of the world's largest networks and serves 55 million HTTP requests per second.

Using a Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) such as Cloudflare, can help absorb large amounts of traffic and mitigate the impact of DoS attacks.

When a user requests a webpage, the CDN delivers the content from the nearest server to the user. As a result, the loading times are faster since the data has to travel a shorter distance. CDNs offer endless benefits like reduced bandwidth usage, scalability, increased reliability, and more. Some well-known CDNs include Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Akamai, and Fastly. They offer several features that help reduce web page sizes and make websites run better.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare offers low/no markup domain name registration with a free DNS service. This will virtually always be your cheapest option for domain name renewals. They don't list prices for all TLDs upfront, so use this list to get your best estimate.

Our site used Cloudflare to handle all our DNS needs. Cloudfare has a number of rewrite options but as we needed to make a decision based on a) the URL path and b) rewriting to a specific domain, the only option (as a non enterprise customer) was to use Cloudflare workers (via worker routes).

Add Cloudflare Cahce & Protection

Cloudflare is a cloud-provider, most-known for their CDN, offering several services to build cloud applications. Among them, Cloudflare Workers is a serverless service that allows you to run serverless functions at edge (like Lambda@Edge if you are an AWS user). This means that your code runs closer to end-users, resulting in blazing fast response times.