Cloudflare tunnel versus nginx
We’re trying to evaluate the pros and cons of running our production servers over and nginx with cloudflare DNS proxy vs a Cloudflare tunnel. What’s the recommendation for production scale workloads?
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According to the documentation, Cloudflare Tunnel is an outbound-only daemon service that can run on nearly any host machine and proxies local traffic once validated from the Cloudflare network (https://developers.cloudflare.com/learning-paths/replace-vpn/connect-private-network/cloudflared/).
For production-scale workloads, it's recommended to use Cloudflare Tunnel as it provides a more secure and reliable connection. Cloudflare Tunnel allows you to connect your network infrastructure directly with Cloudflare, rather than using the public Internet, which can improve performance and security (https://developers.cloudflare.com/network-interconnect/).
Additionally, Cloudflare Tunnel can handle a large number of connections and can be scaled horizontally by adding more host machines running
cloudflared replicas (https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/configure-tunnels/tunnel-availability/#cloudflared-replicas).
It's also worth noting that Cloudflare Tunnel can be used in conjunction with other Cloudflare products, such as Load Balancing, to distribute traffic across your endpoints and reduce endpoint strain and latency (https://developers.cloudflare.com/load-balancing/).
In contrast, using an nginx server with Cloudflare DNS proxy may not provide the same level of security and reliability as Cloudflare Tunnel. While it's possible to use an nginx server with Cloudflare DNS proxy, it's not the recommended approach for production-scale workloads.
Therefore, based on the documentation, the recommendation for production-scale workloads is to use Cloudflare Tunnel.Sources
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NGINX + Cloudflare proxy