Reality check - you are not pushing “_a lot_” of traffic relative to any hyperscaler or large scale CDN. They push hundreds of Tbps sustained. You don’t peak at a few Mbps.

They can monitor extreme outliers. It’s not an issue for them.

If there's any company in the world that can survive a lot of extra traffic being pushed through their systems it's Cloudflare.

I bet these new tunnels end up being a fraction of a percentage point of their network traffic.

Your opening piqued my interest, but:

“The substrate itself consists of a few systems…”

I doubt that this is how wordy your communication is.

“It consists of a few systems” would be adequate. And if we had prior context about what else exists that surrounds “the substrate” the “substrate itself” distinction would be meaningful, but it’s not, because you are referring to one object, which is the system you built, and I doubt any enzymes act on it, so it’s likely not a substrate.

Interesting how 4/4 other replies didn't get the centralisation concern despite it being a fairly often discussed topic

There are other reasons not to trust them as well, especially if you've seen how their sales team operates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808

Yeah, it reminds me of Google. Fool me twice ...

I'm not trusting any of these corporates any more

Cloudflare want you to push traffic through their systems. This is yet another traffic generator to drive up Cloudflare’s leverage when negotiating peering with carriers & service providers, in order to drive down the marginal cost of bandwidth for Cloudflare’s actual product viz. the enterprise DDoS protection.

This is pretty great and I think this will be quite important in the age where everyone has their self-hosted services.