The Self-Hosted Cloudflare Alternative - Private CDN
In our past work, some clients have asked us if we could provide a private secure CDN system, similar to Cloudflare.
The Problem with Public CDNs
Public Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) offer cost-effective and convenient solutions, but they often come at the expense of tenant privacy and control. For instance:
- Your threat intelligence may be shared with other tenants.
- Your traffic and data could be decrypted on external infrastructure.
- Shared network resources might lead to using tainted IP addresses, potentially harming your business's security and brand reputation.
In terms of performance and availability, public CDNs also have limitations in specific environments. Traffic may be rerouted to distant Points of Presence (PoPs), adding latency. Over-reliance on a single provider can result in vendor lock-in and risks of outages. Additionally, shared networks often lack visibility into internal service status or detailed insights into outage causes. In contrast, an on-demand, self-hosted edge network can offer greater flexibility to meet specific business needs.
Shortcomings of Existing Solutions
Our research shows that while some self-hosted CDN systems exist, they fail to fully meet customer demands. They either lack critical features, underperform, or rely on complex combinations of open-source software. Many were not designed with self-hosting in mind. The world lacks an elegant, enterprise-grade, self-hosted CDN system.
To build a secure CDN like Cloudflare, you need a robust technology stack, including:
- A high-performance reverse proxy, such as Nginx or OpenResty.
- A powerful distributed configuration management system to ensure real-time synchronization of configurations across edges, supporting millions of domains.
- A versatile caching system capable of handling large and small files with flexible caching strategies.
- Advanced traffic control policies to enable fine-grained, extensible functionality.
- A global traffic scheduling system, either leveraging Anycast or a custom-designed DNS solution.
- A robust monitoring and observability system for reliable log and event transmission, plus quality monitoring of edge nodes.
- An intelligent routing network to achieve high-speed, end-to-end connectivity.
- DDoS mitigation capabilities at the network layer.
- And more...
- Finally, the ability to combine these components into a simple, reliable, production-grade system.
For an individual or small team, building such a system is a near-impossible task. Most would give up at this point.
AxisNow: A Modern Solution
Edge cloud providers like Cloudflare were built over a decade ago. Today’s landscape is vastly different, with abundant cloud and traditional IDC infrastructure, and even home network resources. The software and tools for building and operating such systems have also matured significantly.
This inspired us to create AxisNow, a self-hosted mini-Cloudflare that enables individuals, small teams, and large organizations to easily deploy and manage edge nodes in the cloud or on-premises infrastructure. AxisNow is extensible, user-friendly, secure, reliable, and performs exceptionally well for businesses of any scale.
AxisNow has officially launched, and we’re committed to continuously improving it to deliver a modern, self-hosted edge platform. We handle the complexity so you can focus on simplicity.
What’s Next?
Starting with self-hosted CDNs, we’ll iterate rapidly based on user needs. We aim to evolve AxisNow into a more powerful platform. Our goal remains unchanged: to provide modern applications with robust connectivity and uncompromising security. In the AI era, we’re here to help you build better products with lower costs, higher security, and simpler operations.