Cloudflare's Railgun - Retrospective

Personal Perspective

I certainly had a lot of fun setting up the install and it definitely reaffirmed my love of Cloudflare. A lot of the process was very intuitive and there was ample documentation. My favorite part of the platform is how forgiving it is. Working with the website was a breeze.

I think some of the difficulties I had were working with IPv6 (I don’t currently have an address) and having the railgun listener allow inbound connections. Similarly, memcached was fairly difficult to work with due to a lack of documentation. I also spent a large amount of time trying to enable SELinux, but ultimately had to postpone since there was difficulty getting Railgun and memcached to work together with SELinux enforcing.

However, it was really fun and rewarding figuring out how to get these systems to talk to each other. I also feel like I learned a lot about both the platform and IPv6. Railgun is also a treat: it is truly fascinating technology.

Customer Perspective

I think it would be very fair for a customer to have a lot of questions during the process. It’s a really exciting technology but I think that I was afforded the luxury of by able to “tinker around” with the software. I also had periods where my website was down, which would be unacceptable for enterprise clients.

As intuitive as the process was, I think there were still some hiccups that a customer might be less inclined to spend time with. Overall, I think a customer would be capable of getting the system running, but I think it’s a time versus reward discussion. I imagine that enterprise clients would be seeking help for the setup and I think it would be really interesting to walk someone through the process.