Cloudflare Quick Tunnels
118 points by jcbhmr 3 hours ago | 70 comments
dangoodmanUT 2 hours ago
Historically, we’ve found that their tunnels have really high latency variance. For example something that’s normally 30-50ms to ec2 is now 115ms-750ms
replyisrarkhan 27 minutes ago
For someone looking for an opensource solutions, following is an awesome resource for tunnelling
replyhttps://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
I have played around with frp, bore and ngrok.
aliasxneo 2 hours ago
Tunneling was something that recently fell out of the work I've been doing [1]. I've used Cloudflare Tunnels before but I just have low trust with them recently with how big they are getting. All of these nice things come at the cost of pushing _a lot_ of traffic through their systems.
replypstoll 13 minutes ago
Reality check - you are not pushing “_a lot_” of traffic relative to any hyperscaler or large scale CDN. They push hundreds of Tbps sustained. You don’t peak at a few Mbps.
replyThey can monitor extreme outliers. It’s not an issue for them.
simonw 32 minutes ago
If there's any company in the world that can survive a lot of extra traffic being pushed through their systems it's Cloudflare.
replyI bet these new tunnels end up being a fraction of a percentage point of their network traffic.
aliasxneo 30 minutes ago
Yeah, I don't doubt their infrastructure at all. In fact, I rate them fairly high in terms of reliability and performance. I've honestly been a fan of them for a very long time - it's just I'm watching all of this centralization happen and it sets my Spidey sense off. Like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
replyceejayoz 23 minutes ago
I didn't take it as a capacity concern, but a "how much data do they get to look at" one.
replyinopinatus 9 minutes ago
Cloudflare want you to push traffic through their systems. This is yet another traffic generator to drive up Cloudflare’s leverage when negotiating peering with carriers & service providers, in order to drive down the marginal cost of bandwidth for Cloudflare’s actual product viz. the enterprise DDoS protection.
replyAnyone familiar with The Peering Playbook will recognise what's going on here.
whizzter 2 hours ago
Don't all these free proxy services always fall prey to blacklists because scammers,etc abuse them until they're useless?
replyImustaskforhelp 59 minutes ago
Yes they actually do, but because its cloudflare which is offering this, blacklisting it might lead to blacklisting can be more negative and cloudflare has a much higher incentive to not make these tunnels useless. They are also more powerful and can fix things which would be harder for smaller companies to handle (atleast within the context of cloudflare tunnels)
replyhimata4113 43 minutes ago
This has existed for a long time and has been abused by quite a few people. I've seen some cc nodes using a random known cloudflare site and spoofing hostname to a temporary cloudflare site. IMO this should require a login at bare minimum.
replyrplnt 31 minutes ago
Are we in an age where no one even bothers to open the product pages they generate? The first subtitle with the font color almost matching the background. Or it's even worse that a human looked at it and said "yep, that's OK"?
replylkbm 27 minutes ago
It's fine on light mode. It's just the dark mode that's terrible. Seems likely they only tested the former.
replyreaperducer 29 minutes ago
Are we in an age where no one even bothers to open the product pages they generate?
replyWe live in an age of monkey-see-monkey-do management.
When Microsoft axed its QA team, it gave permission for everyone else to make the same stupid mistake.
singpolyma3 10 minutes ago
It looks like tunnels can do some non https stuff these days? But it's a bit unclear
replyggg011012 16 minutes ago
Quick Tunnels look great for demos and temporary dev environments. I’d still be hesitant to make them part of a long-lived production setup.
replyJV00 2 hours ago
Does this have a more generous allowance than ngrok? From what I can read no limits are mentioned
replyraahelb 2 minutes ago
These are the limitations mentioned on the docs [1]. Quick Tunnels are subject to a hard limit on the number of concurrent requests that can be proxied at any point in time. Currently, this limit is 200 in-flight requests. If a Quick Tunnel hits this limit, the HTTP response will return a 429 status code. Quick Tunnels do not support Server-Sent Events (SSE).
reply[1]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/networks/co...
daemonologist 58 minutes ago
I don't know if there's an overall limit, but their regular tunnels have a limit of 100 MB per request which breaks stuff like Immich.
replykelvinjps10 15 minutes ago
What's the difference between this and their previous Cloudflare Tunnels solution?
replyNarciss 52 minutes ago
My AI discovered this days ago when I wanted to deploy a new vibe coded website (it was to keep score while playing whist and rentz)
replyThought it was very cool
smalltorch 49 minutes ago
If your a hobbiest or dev just testing your services, it makes more sense to utilize onion services imho.
replyIt does the exact same thing, except supported by a global network of volunteers around the world.
Sure, you get some latency, but this is actually ideal for testing. You should know how your service operates in non optimal lightning fast conditions.
thenewnewguy 42 minutes ago
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or this is an HN out of touch moment.
replyThe obvious difference (and thus massive advantage) of the cloudfare product is that it is accessible over the normal internet without needing to install a tor client.
I'm sure that works for some subset of the population where all potential users are already comfortable using Tor; but imagine trying to share your PoC website with the designer/client and you are asking them to install Tor browser.
smalltorch 29 minutes ago
>hobbiest or dev just testing your services
replyIs different than sharing your work with a client.
I personally wouldnt make it SOP to utilize a complely free service like this to share my work. I'm not saying it's not convient, it definitely is.
But you shouldn't subject a clients product to terms they probably aren't aware of.
ZeroCool2u 2 hours ago
This is handy, but I wonder how much it will cannibalize their services. I have a simple app deployed on cloudflare for a very niche single purpose use, but I wouldn't have bothered if I had this. Serving it from my own machine would have been fine.
replydanserfaty 28 minutes ago
Maybe it's a nice way to quickly test a new service or change over the internet without going through the git process, same way one would use ngrok - I could see that being helpful when prototyping / pocs, etc - before deploying changes to your app via the proper channel, especially if you are already using cloudflare for your domains/apps. As other people said, it probably would not be practical or scalable for most people to run an app 24/7 from their laptop using their home or office internet connection.
replyaniviacat 59 minutes ago
Cloudflare Tunnels has been a free service of Cloudflare for quite a while now. What's new is being able to use them without needing an account.
replyroncesvalles 51 minutes ago
Not many people run their local machine 24/7.
replyberofeev 36 minutes ago
What does reality look like on this nowadays?
replyMy initial thought was desktops generally run 24/7, with laptops running when in use. At least for the customer at the market intersection for this type of product.
JavierFlores09 9 minutes ago
I often tell my dev colleagues to avoid having their PC turned on all the time, be it because of the electricity bill cost, environmental impact or simply to make the longevity of the hardware a little longer. Granted almost everyone just ignores those things even if they're conscious of it, so I'd say you're right
replytombert 31 minutes ago
I like Cloudflare Tunnels a lot, but something that annoys me is that officially you're not allowed to use them for streaming video, meaning I can't put it in front of my Jellyfin without breaking TOS.
replyI think that rule is more of a "we reserve the right to..." rule, but it makes me sad because I'd rather not open up ports on my router to expose my Jellyfin to my parents.
bityard 10 minutes ago
Bandwidth costs money and streaming video costs several orders of magnitude more than just your random web/dev apps. Asking CF to foot the bill for entertainment streaming is really quite a lot.
replyTonyStr 23 minutes ago
I discovered and set this up the other day, added jellyfin, immich and forgejo and was really happy about the result for five minutes, before I discovered that limitation in the TOS. Now I only use it for forgejo. Have you found a different solution to exposing jellyfin?
replymadeforhnyo 13 minutes ago
For free idk, I personally use a VPS (with unlimited traffic) and Tailscale. Someone has to pay for the public IP and proxy.
replytamimio 13 minutes ago
Use pangolin (you can self host), been using it for a while and it’s great, under the hood it’s a vpn+reverse proxy which you can do yourself too.
In pangolin you can have public or private resources, where private ones you need to authenticate through pangolin first (either pass or others like pin number for your parents so easy to remember). When you link your domain for public ones, I suggest you make a sub domain for it, so your apps will be a sub to your subdomain, that way you keep control of your main domain while having automatic assignment for your apps rather than manually, and if you didn’t issue a certificate, that sub.subdomain is basically invisible on the internet unless you host a service to expose it.
replyuser3939382 2 hours ago
I just spent a week writing a harness around the existing tunnels to make this by hand.
replyThrowawayTestr 2 hours ago
No-ip gives out free dynamic DNS with a static URL. I use it for Sunshine desktop streaming when I travel.
replycuu508 60 minutes ago
Yeah, but then you are always exposing your public IP.
reply
edit: yeah, it says no account creation, neat!
https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling