Routing

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.

The server hosting this domain is a VPS hosted in Switzerland by Nimag network SàRL. Access speed from Asia is pretty bad, specially due to network latency on the pipes Singapore-US and US-Europe. In using a CDN to serve assets, we improve global page loading time in lowering the loading times of assets. The VPS has a good European connexion, there is not much need for visitors in Europe to use a CDN.