Internet

With the raise of API driven apps, CORS is becoming an unavoidable subject. By adding a CDN, your CORS rules become a burden on caching.

Why build a GeoIP API when you can buy it directly from Maxmind or use their GeoIP Databases? Using the downloadable database works well when used on an instance. When you need it inside Lambda or Glue, it becomes difficult to keep it up-to-date. It becomes easier to use an external HTTP-API. Hosting it yourself reduces the response time by having it nearer to your apps and you can extend your service by combining multiples sources.

Once you start to integrate services with Telcos, ISPs or other major Network players who are not “Cloud Aware”, you will need to go the VPN way using IPSec. Their setups have used all the available IP’s defined by RFC 1918 (or just don’t want to use them). They will want to use Public IP’s behind your VPN. The problem is that your EC2 instances are running behind a 1:1 NAT with only a private IP’s attached to them. To add to the complexity, your instances are part of an auto-scaling group, with IP’s all over 10.0.0.0/8. Luckily the way to solve this problem is actually quite easy, we just need to add some iptables rules and a proxy.

While writing about Cloudfront, I came accross another CDN service called Cloudflare. The free entry price made me suspicious, hosting and transport has a price. Since I had nothing to loose and that this domain was new, I decided to give it a try. So far, didn’t find any dirty trick. What is Cloudflare? CDN is one of the features, but in fact, they do more than just delivery. Content Delivery Network They place themselves in the CDN category.