Decentralized Cloudflare Replacement (CDN, Reverse-Proxy, DDOS Protection)

storaje · August 4, 2020, 2:41am

Add a caching reverse proxy to nodes to act as a decentralized Cloudflare replacement.

Static assets (images, JS, downloads) can be cached as objects stored in tardigrade while dynamic (and private) data can be reverse proxied through nodes to the web server being protected.

Standard rates would be charged for data cached in tardigrade but a new payment level would need to be calculated for reverse proxy traffic.

Of course, Cloudflare has a free tier tardigrade wouldn’t be able to compete with but a decentralized open source replacement for Cloudflare may be appreciated by the community. Especially after the recent outage which brought down half the internet.

Toyoo · August 4, 2020, 4:38pm

It doesn’t really make that much sense, as:

nodes do not store whole files, only stripes of chunks, so they’d need to fetch other stripes and chunks to serve them, and
nodes do not have uptime requirements tight enough for a CDN.

storaje · August 5, 2020, 4:40pm

An individual node would not be responsible for sending all the data. It would be distributed across multiple nodes the same as retrieving a file is currently.

hoarder · August 5, 2020, 5:25pm

Running a CDN node on private hardware is a huge risk for all parties involved. No customer wants the possibility of malicious SNO modifying the data and no SNO wants the possibility of serving illegal content form personal hardware.