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The web was supposed to be open, but if the technologies are only well implimented privately it's not open at all. Props to cloudflare certainly, but this is a

The web was supposed to be open, but if the technologies are only well implimented privately it's not open at all. Props to cloudflare certainly, but this is a further nail in the coffin of open software. Wasm was supposed to be well useable outside the browser and to date there are no well made libraries that deliver on it. It's all experimentation in the open. Technology that I cannot use well in my own applications is effectively proprietary.

ryanworl 8y ago
You can use WASM from Node. There is even an open source module called “isolated-vm” which implements a similar security scheme to the one employed by Cloudflare. You could install that on whatever you want and run essentially the same thing (minus the rest of Cloudflare, obviously).
- devwastaken 8y ago
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-workers/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-workers/ the original workers release explains why they dont use node and instead build with v8 directly. Node is not a cure all. It's for prototyping with wasm. You need significantly more integration with the execution environment to have DOS protection. How cloudflare does this I don't know. They'd have to remove features like multithreading and continually patch around v8 afaik. Even spidermonkies API is unuseable in a server context.
  - ryanworl 8y ago
    I know what Cloudflare workers are. Did you look at isolated-vm? It uses the V8 isolate API exactly how Cloudflare describes it being used, except it is exposed as a Node module so you can write the “parent” process in JavaScript instead of C++. It exposes memory limits and wall & cpu time limits. It is sponsored by the Fly.io CDN from what I can tell for exactly the same use case as Cloudflare workers.
    - devwastaken 8y ago
      I only found mention of v8-isolate when searching for it specifically. Coming up in only https://blog.cloudflare.com/serverless-performance-comparison-workers-lambda/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/serverless-performance-compariso... and a few comments on HN. I don't see any description of its use other than a summary of 'we use v8 isolates', which begs a /r/restofthefuckingowl. Even an interview with KV doesn't reveal much. https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/SED513-CloudFlare-Workers.pdf https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2018... Isolate also doesn't do anything for sandboxing from what I can tell. Cloudflare quotes 'That said, we have added additional layers of our own sandboxing on top of V8.' I do not see any actual technical information on how they're using v8. v8 and by extension isolated-vm by itself does not cover things like fetch if we're talking JS. https://github.com/laverdet/isolated-vm/issues/63 https://github.com/laverdet/isolated-vm/issues/63 This is an immediete killer as js browser features are part of why a js engine is wanted. Having node handling these things is a time bomb of debugging where instead of debugging v8 you're debugging node. There are node version problems with stability as mentioned on the isolate-vm readme. DOS goes beyond just CPU time and memory. Wasm is being treated as an environment of its own with some lower level accessibility. Unless the API allows feature whitelisting - I can't find any docs relating to that - then I don't see anything stopping thread creation. I'd be interested to know how cloudflare prevents these features. isolate-vm doesn't appear to interact with the v8 api with options relating to this. Fly.io has their fly engine meant for local development so you can deploy onto their servers. https://github.com/superfly/fly https://github.com/superfly/fly

ryanworl 8y ago

You can use WASM from Node. There is even an open source module called “isolated-vm” which implements a similar security scheme to the one employed by Cloudflare. You could install that on whatever you want and run essentially the same thing (minus the rest of Cloudflare, obviously).

devwastaken 8y ago
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-workers/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-workers/ the original workers release explains why they dont use node and instead build with v8 directly. Node is not a cure all. It's for prototyping with wasm. You need significantly more integration with the execution environment to have DOS protection. How cloudflare does this I don't know. They'd have to remove features like multithreading and continually patch around v8 afaik. Even spidermonkies API is unuseable in a server context.
- ryanworl 8y ago
  I know what Cloudflare workers are. Did you look at isolated-vm? It uses the V8 isolate API exactly how Cloudflare describes it being used, except it is exposed as a Node module so you can write the “parent” process in JavaScript instead of C++. It exposes memory limits and wall & cpu time limits. It is sponsored by the Fly.io CDN from what I can tell for exactly the same use case as Cloudflare workers.
  - devwastaken 8y ago
    I only found mention of v8-isolate when searching for it specifically. Coming up in only https://blog.cloudflare.com/serverless-performance-comparison-workers-lambda/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/serverless-performance-compariso... and a few comments on HN. I don't see any description of its use other than a summary of 'we use v8 isolates', which begs a /r/restofthefuckingowl. Even an interview with KV doesn't reveal much. https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/SED513-CloudFlare-Workers.pdf https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2018... Isolate also doesn't do anything for sandboxing from what I can tell. Cloudflare quotes 'That said, we have added additional layers of our own sandboxing on top of V8.' I do not see any actual technical information on how they're using v8. v8 and by extension isolated-vm by itself does not cover things like fetch if we're talking JS. https://github.com/laverdet/isolated-vm/issues/63 https://github.com/laverdet/isolated-vm/issues/63 This is an immediete killer as js browser features are part of why a js engine is wanted. Having node handling these things is a time bomb of debugging where instead of debugging v8 you're debugging node. There are node version problems with stability as mentioned on the isolate-vm readme. DOS goes beyond just CPU time and memory. Wasm is being treated as an environment of its own with some lower level accessibility. Unless the API allows feature whitelisting - I can't find any docs relating to that - then I don't see anything stopping thread creation. I'd be interested to know how cloudflare prevents these features. isolate-vm doesn't appear to interact with the v8 api with options relating to this. Fly.io has their fly engine meant for local development so you can deploy onto their servers. https://github.com/superfly/fly https://github.com/superfly/fly