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It's more like Cloudflare forked nginx a long time ago, and is meanwhile in the very slow (like, decade-long) process of replacing it entirely.
The Cloudflare Workers Runtime, for instance, is built directly around V8; it does not use nginx or any other existing web server stack. Many new features of Cloudflare are in turn built on Workers, and much of the old stack build on nginx is gradually being migrated to Workers. https://workers.dev https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
In another part of the stack, there is Pingora, another built-from-scratch web server focused on high-performance proxying and caching: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-pingora-the-proxy-t...
Even when using nginx, Cloudflare has rewritten or added big chunks of code, such as implementing HTTP/3: https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche And of course there is a ton of business logic written in Lua on top of that nginx base.
Though arguably, Cloudflare's biggest piece of magic is the layer 3 network. It's so magical that people don't even think about it, it just works. Seamlessly balancing traffic across hundreds of locations without even varying IP addresses is, well, not easy.
I could go on... automatic SSL provisioning? DDoS protection? etc. These aren't nginx features.
So while Cloudflare may have gotten started being more-or-less nginx-as-a-service I don't think you can really call it that anymore.
(I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers.)
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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It's more like Cloudflare forked nginx a long time ago, and is meanwhile in the very slow (like, decade-long) process of replacing it entirely.
The Cloudflare Workers Runtime, for instance, is built directly around V8; it does not use nginx or any other existing web server stack. Many new features of Cloudflare are in turn built on Workers, and much of the old stack build on nginx is gradually being migrated to Workers. https://workers.dev https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
In another part of the stack, there is Pingora, another built-from-scratch web server focused on high-performance proxying and caching: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-pingora-the-proxy-t...
Even when using nginx, Cloudflare has rewritten or added big chunks of code, such as implementing HTTP/3: https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche And of course there is a ton of business logic written in Lua on top of that nginx base.
Though arguably, Cloudflare's biggest piece of magic is the layer 3 network. It's so magical that people don't even think about it, it just works. Seamlessly balancing traffic across hundreds of locations without even varying IP addresses is, well, not easy.
I could go on... automatic SSL provisioning? DDoS protection? etc. These aren't nginx features.
So while Cloudflare may have gotten started being more-or-less nginx-as-a-service I don't think you can really call it that anymore.
(I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers.)
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No mention of Coral CDN:
https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Coral_CDN
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Content_Distribution_Net...
https://github.com/morganestes/coralcdn
Just a few years ago, you could append .nyud.net to any domain and fetch it through the Coral cache instantly. But it's apparently been quietly swept under the rug.
Caching is such a basic thing to do that I'm concerned that the current crop of CDNs will mostly be used for mass surveillance. I also worry that VPNs are used for similar purposes by spy agencies.
IMHO the static web should have been distributed from the start. It should have been https everywhere. We should have kept cookies instead of trying to wedge in security on the frontend with OAuth, which is like a leaky sieve in comparison. We should have had Subresource Integrity (SRI) and been able to load scripts and other sensitive files from these caches fearlessly.
