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A CNAME is just a DNS record that points to another DNS record, technically they could allow it for free users too.
I'd guess the point is they get info on what free users do with their DNS, to help make their paid services more appealing.
No offense, but you might be seriously overthinking this.
Ah, perfect. My hypothesis was correct!
Haha, I'm aware I'm probably trying to delve deeper than most users, but I really want to understand the technology I plan to use. I am also very interested in Networking and such concepts intrigue me!
Could you tell me how proxying traffic would work if they just asked the user to create a CNAME rather than using their nameservers? I still can't figure this part out.
My apologies for asking so many questions, but I just can't seem to rest till I wrap my head around this :)
No need to apologize.
You'd create a CNAME for
myservice.mydomain.com, that points toproxynearorigin.cloudflare.com.proxynearorigin.cloudflare.comcontains the A and AAAA records for the reverse proxy servers. When you do a DNS query formyservice.mydomain.com, it will (eventually) resolve to the CF proxy IPs.The CF proxies see from the traffic that you originally requested
myservice.mydomain.comand serve your content based on that. This still requires you to tell Cloudflare where the origin server is so the reverse proxies can connect to it.On the free service instead of the CNAME you set the origin server's IP as the A and/or AAAA record. Enabling the proxy service actually changes this so that when someone makes a DNS query to
myservice.mydomain.comthey get the proxy addresses straight as A and AAAA records, leaving the IP you originally configured known only to Cloudflare internally.It's hard to explain this, and since I don't work at Cloudflare the details may be off too. The best way to get an idea is play around with something like NGINX and run a local DNS server (Bind, Unbound, dnsmasq, PiHole...) and see for yourself how the DNS system works.
CDN isn't really related to DNS at all. In the case of the CF free tier, it's actually more like caching static content, which is technically a bit different. A CDN is a service that replicates said static content to multiple locations on high-performant servers, allowing the content to always be served from close to to the client. Where DNS comes in is that Anycast is probably used, and
cdn.cloudflare.comactually resolves to different IPs depending on where the DNS query is made from.There's also the chance that I don't actually know what I'm talking about, but luckily someone will most likely correct me if that's the case. :)