14 ms·

Cloudflare on the edge

334 points by kaboro 5y ago

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
Over 10 years ago: Panelist: "Would your vision eventually, this disruption, take over internal teams working on these problems." CEO: "Our vision is we're going to power the Internet. [Dead serious face and stare]." Video in the article. Amazing vision and execution.
- eastdakota 5y ago
  I think I was pretty cocky. :-p But it really was how we thought about what we were doing from day one. Our litmus test was always: “If we ran the Internet, would this be the right decision?” Asked that for every technical, business, and policy/legal question we faced. Seemed absurd when it was 8 of us over a nail salon in Palo Alto, but led to a lot of good decisions and long-term thinking.
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    I've been using Cloudflare for many many years now, I like it a lot. I like that I mostly set it up once and forgot about it. I just found about Durable Objects and can't wait to try them on a new project for a client that has a use case like: few days per year has a huge traffic spike (tens of thousands concurrent users) while the rest of the year is pretty much dead. I think DOs could be a perfect fit for this. Cheers and let's hope for another 10 great years, :D.
  - graiz 5y ago
    Matt - You built an amazing company. So few entrepreneurs really have a long-term vision. Kudos and excited to see the next 10 years brings.
- nojito 5y ago
  Also a tremendously obvious case of hindsight bias in action. Shows the immaturity in the analysis of stratechery in my opinion.
  - WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
    Ha, hard to please! I guess building and executing a billion dollar company on those exact words isn’t enough for you. I agree the journey probably wasn’t as 0 or 1 as my comment makes it seem. But in all seriousness, it’s okay to relax a little, not to be negative, and concede some things to be inspired.
    - nojito 5y ago
      My statements have nothing to do with cloudflare and its well-deserved success. It has everything to do with the shoddy "analysis" being posted.
underseacables 5y ago
Cloudflare slipped too far into censorship to support them any further. I used to promote their service to customers but no longer. The last thing I want to power the Internet is a persobality driven agenda for censorship.
- brightball 5y ago
  When did Cloudflare slip into censorship?
  - hackcasual 5y ago
    Maybe they mean this? https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
    - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
      They probably mean 8chan rather than this.
      - hackcasual 5y ago
        Ah yes, the platform for mass shooters
        tick_tock_tick 5y ago
        I think you're thinking of Facebook. They are the ones that host livestreams of mass shootings.
- eloff 5y ago
  You mean when they terminated service to the daily stormer or 8chan? I don't like censorship, but I have a hard time criticizing those actions.
  - 5y ago
paulpauper 5y ago
i would not mind seeing cloudflare go away. havingto wait x second before viewing webpages or solving puzzles is annoying
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  This is an unfortunate view, because Cloudflare is a better actor than most of their listed competitors. And the puzzles you are dealing with are merely settings that Cloudflare's customers have decided on, based on the assumption of risk based on how you choose to access the web. Instead of pitching a fit at Cloudflare, encourage and promote positive views of Tor-based browsing, privacy-respecting browser settings, etc. There's an unfortunate reality that people want those Cloudflare settings because they stop a lot of malicious traffic, while allowing the vast majority of legitimate traffic. As we move the window of legitimate traffic to be more privacy-respecting, you'll see the boundaries of such behaviors are forced to adjust.
  - techsupporter 5y ago
    > Instead of pitching a fit at Cloudflare, encourage and promote positive views of Tor-based browsing I don't know if the person to whom you are replying is using Tor, but I'm definitely not and I also despise how Cloudflare--or their customers, but I have no way of differentiating the two--reacts to various things. My home ISP is a very small outfit that mainly serves apartment buildings in my area. I don't know why, but every three or so weeks, Cloudflare decides that my ISP is a massive pile of risk and starts shunting almost every request I make through their "analysing your browser please be patient" screen. It's nothing specific to my computer because if I flip on a tunnel through my server in a colocation service in the same city as me, I get zero prompts. I've worked with my ISP and they've basically given me free reign to assign myself whatever public IP I want out of their /22 (as long as it's not in use by another customer, of course) and, during these times, any IP I choose gets the same response from Cloudflare. It's the same lack of transparency and being able to say "hey, what gives" that applies to spam filtering by the big e-mail providers or getting dropped into the "scam likely" bucket for mobile phone calls. I understand the need to filter and screen and protect but that doesn't mean I have to like it when it splashes onto me.
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
The quotes at the end are excellent, they emphasize that your Microsofts and Googles of the world are going to try to throw their weight around to force the Internet to work the way works best for their business, rather than accepting a political reality, that the Internet is a communications medium, and laws are going to affect it differently in different countries, just as they do today for phone, mail, and any other medium.
- vinay_ys 5y ago
  Bigger companies are more compliant to the local laws than smaller companies. Simply because they have more to lose if the local government turns against them, they tread more carefully. Small companies can afford to fly under the radar just because they are small and likely catering to the fringe users and not to the masses.
  - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    > Bigger companies are more compliant to the local laws than smaller companies. Sort of, but partly because those bigger companies are often the ones writing the laws. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. operate "public policy teams", whose goal is to push legislators to enshrine their business practices as law.
    - Mordisquitos 5y ago
      That may indeed be a factor, but it can happen even without active lobbying on the part of big business—all they need to do is sit back and let things flow. Be it in good faith or for cynical electioneering, lawmakers will introduce new regulatory requirements under the argument that they better protect the consumer or encourage a more competitive marketplace. However, the more complex these become, and the faster they change, the more it helps big business for they are the ones who can afford the legal teams and resources to keep track of them. Don't get me wrong, I'm nowhere near an economic laissez-fair libertarian, and I believe that strong regulation is necessary in many markets and industries. However, I'm also very wary of well-meaning but overly complex rules which do little but add a huge barrier to competition against the big players.
ignoramous 5y ago
The article doesn't talk about Cloudflare One, but I think that is a bigger opportunity than Edge computing in the short term, given the rise in ransomware attacks targeting tech-naïve institutions forced online due to the pandemic. Re: Edge: AWS has answers in Lambda at Edge (PoPs), Wavelength (5G Edge), and Local Zones (metro DCs); whilst Google has similar arrangements through its Anthos product line, if I'm not mistaken. Though, where Cloudflare shines is they architect their products to deploy and run from all locations around the world. Cloudflare also positions its ("global") products as being the simplest of all cloud providers to use. We stand to see how long they can remain as simple once they start ramping up on newer product lines and eventually have to support different integration points among them. The article points out that Matthew Prince, being a HBS graduate, quotes Clayton Christensen in his TechCrunch Disrupt Q&A; and from what little I gather, Andy Jassy comes from the same school of thought, as well [0]. I'm looking forward to more innovation from Cloudflare [1]. I've slowly moved all workloads that Cloudflare Edge could support out from AWS to it; only regret is AWS credits lay waste especially given we are pre-revenue. That said, Cloudflare's (limited) offerings are a better choice if you're a small engineering shop and couldn't be bothered with a gazillion bill items, IAM rules, and VPCs. [0] https://archive.is/tBpsj https://archive.is/tBpsj [1] ...and new-age cloud computing companies like railway.app, replit.com, darklang.com, stackpath.com, deno.land, vercel.com, fly.io to name a few.
redis_mlc 5y ago
> He said running a company is a bit like flying an airplane. You want to make sure it’s well maintained at all times. And that when you’re flying, you keep the wheel steady and the nose 10 degrees about the horizon. Yup, VC b.s. spotted. (You don't cruise with the nose 10 degrees above the horizon.)
Budabellly 5y ago
Good article, I feel people don't spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. The gap here for me is that AWS, GCP, and the like are perfectly equipped to build infra "from the edge in" as well. It's just not an advantage for Cloudflare -- I'd actually argue that AWS has the comparative advantage in building "from the edge in" given the clip at which they can turn out datacenters. With the new Outpost model as well, I don't see too many hurdles for AWS to just start deploying their whole feature set in any old colo, in any old country, in a matter of months. They do have to set their minds to it though. At the very least, they should definitely have their storage services in every country with actual data locality laws. I'm sure I'm missing something, but on the infra side I don't see what Cloudflare is better at in this regard. I'd also argue that AWS storage migration is just as good or better than Cloudflare's offering here. I won't comment on how users perceive/value each service because I don't use either much. What I definitely DO agree with, is that infra "from the edge in" is a major threat to existing public cloud business models. At the point where you have your whole stack portable from colo to colo (or, gasp, as a dAPP), it starts to sound more like public cloud as a library, rather than as a centralized managed service. Open source communities, unbundlers, and new-age cloud companies together will have a field day building 'library' versions of common cloud services and I think Cloudflare will pair nicely at that point. The question is when that becomes a reality.
- daxfohl 5y ago
  An outpost/local_zone still has to have a home region that serves as the primary control plane IIUC, so I don't think that would be applicable here. (That said, I think given their experience deploying to China, meeting GDPR, etc, and their focus on whatever it takes to make money, AWS and others should have no problem figuring out a solution to local regulations if that's what it ends up coming down to. That's far more likely than enterprises deciding to restructure everything they do around Cloudflare Workers, or Cloudflare becoming a full cloud platform.)
  - Budabellly 5y ago
    Agree, especially with the concession. "Big Cloud" is best equipped to deal with forthcoming regulations. Outpost may be local zones today (needs fact check), but maybe a better question is what is the minimum service threshold for AWS to deploy a new "global zone". Considering data locality is the topic at-hand, I would surmise it's not that much and that Big Cloud can handily deploy new global zones at the rate that these new regulations crop up. Totally separate topic -- but my other thought is these laws are totally at odds with the decentralization trend. Not sure how FileCoin, Sia, Storj et al are thinking about this... maybe building the decentralized storage _protocol_ is the escape hatch, but maybe not.
the_duke 5y ago
I recently tried out Workers. The tooling, documentation and language integration is rather awkward and cumbersome at the moment. Sparse documentation, language tooling that seems very half baked, workflows don't feel intuitive. But there is definitely potential.
- kylegill 5y ago
  I had a similar experience. I tried installing some of their CLI tools and was met with some undocumented errors I didn't want to bother digging through code to figure out. > But there is definitely potential. I agree! It's something I'm watching with eager eyes, but don't feel like is the first option I'd turn to when making a technology choice. Another technology that gives me this feeling is FaunaDB [0]. [0]: https://fauna.com/ https://fauna.com/
- csomar 5y ago
  There is lots of potential. I'm working on a startup idea around Cloudflare at the moment. Here is something that can help with Cloudflare horrible tooling: Use wasm/Rust. You'll be able to compile and run most of your code locally, and then when you deploy you have more odds of your code not bugging on the cloud.
  - stefan_ 5y ago
    Feels a lot like uploading PHP via FTP. The world moved on, I expect to test this stuff locally and if it breaks because of screwed up vendor tools, there better be source code.
    - csomar 5y ago
      It is PHP via FTP with a key-value database. The difference is that you have no server to manage and your code is deployed to hundreds of locations.
- ryan29 5y ago
  I have something fairly simple I’m going to build to try out workers. The getting started docs seemed ok to me. I would love to have a local runtime so I could iterate faster.
johnklos 5y ago
The article neatly ignores the reality that Cloudflare is a shitty company that wants to lock everyone possible in as much as possible, that wants to re-centralize the Internet, that wants to become a monopoly. For every product or service they create, ask yourself this: if taken to the logical conclusion where a majority of people use Cloudflare, do their products help the world, or do their products help them? Do they help the world to their detriment, or do they help Cloudflare to the detriment of the world? Anyone except fanbois will realize that re-centralization will only hurt the world and will only help Cloudflare, no matter which service or product it is. They're a shitty company with shitty, dishonest, disingenuous people who spout bullshit and make money off of scammers and spammers. I don't think that's going to change any time soon. I, for one, am tired of seeing constant Cloudflare propaganda and masturbation on this site.
- yannoninator 5y ago
  Do you have an alternative to Cloudflare if they are that bad?
  - johnklos 5y ago
    How about NOT Cloudflare? You ask as if they provide services that can't be found elsewhere.
    - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
      I mean they kind of do at-least for free? What is your alternative so linking to a site from this site doesn't crash it without spending a good bit more money than needed every month?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- wmf 5y ago
  Boycotting centralized stuff because it's more efficient isn't going to work, so if you want to avoid the Cloudflarepocalypse you need to work on making decentralized systems competitive.
paxys 5y ago
That last bit about politics/laws is exactly where I fear the internet will be a decade or two from now. Virtual borders will be controlled by nations as strictly as physical ones. Every byte going in or out will be monitored and regulated. "Removing [xyz] from the internet" will be a matter of a government clicking a button rather than the laughable scenario it is today. And they will be assisted every step of the way by companies like Cloudflare, Amazon and Microsoft.
- zsims 5y ago
  Isn't this expected? The "real world" is heavily regulated but the internet is open and free (not always in a good way). It makes it really difficult to deal with crime, cyber warfare, and illicit content. We need "something."
  - judge2020 5y ago
    I think people have enjoyed the Wild West of the Internet long enough for governments to want to put a stop to it proactively instead of retroactively, although I don’t think it necessarily should be done.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  I'm a little more optimistic in that I think decentralized networks will disrupt all these centralized monopolies (ex: imagine a social network where you own your data and can access it through various frontends, rather than one company owning it all). Hopefully, all the rewards will also get re-distributed back to participants in the network rather than one entity. People are starting to realize what happens when a central entity can just "cancel" you and as that keeps happening more often (ex: youtubers getting de-monetized, people getting locked out of their google accounts, Trump twitter cancellation, etc), people will be pushed to these un-censorable decentralized alternatives.
  - markc 5y ago
    Like this?: https://skapp.hns.siasky.net/#/apps/all https://skapp.hns.siasky.net/#/apps/all
daxfohl 5y ago
Their local governance situation is much easier because their platform only does like two and a half things. Once they add enough to become a full fledged cloud provider that an enterprise can lift and shift their SAP and Oracle bare metal servers and whatever else onto with guaranteed performance and availability SLAs, then they're in the same boat. Until they do that, they'll continue to be a niche player for things that fit those two and a half use cases. It's not like enterprises are going to rewrite all their enterprise apps around Workers. I think this is just a matter of people getting tired of the self-driving cars story, and a reach for some other reason to pump up share values.
svara 5y ago
I don't quite understand the point that latency doesn't matter much outside of niche applications. If you're using TCP, bandwidth depends on latency, and surely no one thinks bandwidth isn't important? This totally does matter in the hundreds-of-milliseconds range, you can use one of the online calculators to confirm this. The other thing is that live video/audio isn't niche at all. Cloudflare could prioritize latency-sensitive traffic like that within its network, and deliver it as close to the users as possible on their respective ends. Am I missing something?
- seangrogg 5y ago
  While you're correct to think that latency does indeed matter, I think what the article is trying to point out is that very few services are latency sensitive beyond what is traditionally expected. In many applications, there are certain expectations of performance around certain actions, sure. That said, if things go long the user may get annoyed but they won't be deterred. But in some cases, having anything but the highest regard for latency is not only a deterrence, it's basically completely unacceptable to the user. Sure, you want your blog to load fast. But if your blog takes 300ms or 900ms very few people are going to notice the difference despite the 3x disparity. You're unlikely to get a nastygram on Twitter about your blog being unusable. Hell, even websites that take greater-than-one seconds to load are routinely not taken to task by the average user because, quite frankly, while fast is nice it's not a need. But apply that to a competitive, real-time game and if your service takes 70ms RTT for one of the roughly several hundreds of thousands of commands issued to it over the course of a 20 minute span you're performing about average. At 250ms - dramatically less than the kind of latency bound available to a blog post - you're rapidly approaching "completely unplayable" and going to get nasty responses.
  - donmcronald 5y ago
    I think a lot of webapps undervalue low latency. I remember when Microsoft was talking about Surface research once and said that most people could start to notice latency >20ms. I think talking about the modern web in milliseconds doesn’t represent the way it really is. Based on my experience everything is measured in seconds and UIs are awful compared to what we had 10-20 years ago. It’s like the old green screens that adept users could outperform, but with better graphics and no buffer/command queue.
Animats 5y ago
But given the nature of the internet, isn’t that the whole problem? Because, anyone in Germany can go to any website outside of Germany. That’s the way it used to be, I’m not sure that’s going to be the way it’s going to be in the future. Uh oh. He might be right.
- ableal 5y ago
  In my corner of Europe (Portugal), sites can get blocked at (ISP supplied) DNS resolution. I think it's by court order, under a law passed a few years ago. Mostly for copyright reasons, and circumventable by switching to Google or similar DNS, for those in the know - it's not the great firewall, but it does prevent "anyone" from going to "any website" right now.
fossuser 5y ago
> "And you can manage that okay. You can manage on a per country basis. You feel good about that? > "Sure. I mean, for us, that’s easy. And then we can provide that to our customers as a function of what we’re doing. But I think that if you could say, German rules don’t extend beyond Germany and French rules don’t extend beyond France and Chinese rules don’t extend beyond China and that you have some human rights floor that’s in there." I'd be curious about that human rights floor. It's one thing to follow laws in a western democratic country with elections and rule of law, but it's another to do so in countries without elected governments or rule of law. It sounds like they're thinking about this since he explicitly mentioned the human rights floor, so that's good at least. > "Right. But given the nature of the internet, isn’t that the whole problem? Because, anyone in Germany can go to any website outside of Germany. > "That’s the way it used to be, I’m not sure that’s going to be the way it’s going to be in the future." This makes me sad, I hope we don't end up in a highly nationalized intranet style future but it does seem like things are trending that way (unfortunately).
- wyager 5y ago
  A highly nationalized internet is the inevitable consequence of national and supranational government orgs making demands that extend to companies or users beyond their jurisdiction. HN, disappointingly, seems to support a lot of these measures when it’s a “good guy” (like Germany or the EU) doing it to a “bad guy” (like Facebook), but seems to miss the broader implication. If the internet is going to remain an open and fully connected global network, it’s absolutely necessary that internet entities don’t need to worry about the laws of some country halfway around the world. The alternative is, at best, every website being IP-locked to a small set of countries. Either self-censored to countries that sites feel legally safe exposing themselves to, or censored by governments at transnational network boundaries.
  - mr_toad 5y ago
    > don’t need to worry about the laws of some country halfway around the world. For me, the DCMA is the laws of a country halfway around the world, that the US tries damn hard to enforce on other countries.
mjgs 5y ago
Cloudflare edge workers are pretty awesome for a lot of use cases. I was a bit disappointed that the article doesn’t really talk about the tech, felt like quite a lot of waffle. It’s great for inserting data into a page, because it runs on super fast connections, and means the data is already in the page when it gets to users, there’s no waiting for the browser to fetch and hydrate data into the page, so the UX is awesome. And security is great too because you don’t need to store any access keys in the browser, instead have these in env variables in Cloudflare.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
uptownhr 5y ago
Cloudflare partners with spacex to deliver edge capabilities to the moon and beyond
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
>>> Jurisdictional Restrictions make it easy for developers to build serverless, stateful applications that not only comply with today’s regulations, I'm interested to hear from anyone from fly.io on this - if Inunderstand it their approach is very amenable to this as well - at the simplest level all my app needs is an environment setting telling me which data centre i happen to be running in. then i can start doing whatever regulations I need to.

334 points by kaboro 5y ago

Over 10 years ago: Panelist: "Would your vision eventually, this disruption, take over internal teams working on these problems." CEO: "Our vision is we're going to power the Internet. [Dead serious face and stare]." Video in the article. Amazing vision and execution.

eastdakota 5y ago
I think I was pretty cocky. :-p But it really was how we thought about what we were doing from day one. Our litmus test was always: “If we ran the Internet, would this be the right decision?” Asked that for every technical, business, and policy/legal question we faced. Seemed absurd when it was 8 of us over a nail salon in Palo Alto, but led to a lot of good decisions and long-term thinking.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  I've been using Cloudflare for many many years now, I like it a lot. I like that I mostly set it up once and forgot about it. I just found about Durable Objects and can't wait to try them on a new project for a client that has a use case like: few days per year has a huge traffic spike (tens of thousands concurrent users) while the rest of the year is pretty much dead. I think DOs could be a perfect fit for this. Cheers and let's hope for another 10 great years, :D.
- graiz 5y ago
  Matt - You built an amazing company. So few entrepreneurs really have a long-term vision. Kudos and excited to see the next 10 years brings.
nojito 5y ago
Also a tremendously obvious case of hindsight bias in action. Shows the immaturity in the analysis of stratechery in my opinion.
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
  Ha, hard to please! I guess building and executing a billion dollar company on those exact words isn’t enough for you. I agree the journey probably wasn’t as 0 or 1 as my comment makes it seem. But in all seriousness, it’s okay to relax a little, not to be negative, and concede some things to be inspired.
  - nojito 5y ago
    My statements have nothing to do with cloudflare and its well-deserved success. It has everything to do with the shoddy "analysis" being posted.

underseacables 5y ago

Cloudflare slipped too far into censorship to support them any further. I used to promote their service to customers but no longer. The last thing I want to power the Internet is a persobality driven agenda for censorship.

brightball 5y ago
When did Cloudflare slip into censorship?
- hackcasual 5y ago
  Maybe they mean this? https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
  - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
    They probably mean 8chan rather than this.
    - hackcasual 5y ago
      Ah yes, the platform for mass shooters
      - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
        I think you're thinking of Facebook. They are the ones that host livestreams of mass shootings.
eloff 5y ago
You mean when they terminated service to the daily stormer or 8chan? I don't like censorship, but I have a hard time criticizing those actions.
- 5y ago

paulpauper 5y ago

i would not mind seeing cloudflare go away. havingto wait x second before viewing webpages or solving puzzles is annoying

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
This is an unfortunate view, because Cloudflare is a better actor than most of their listed competitors. And the puzzles you are dealing with are merely settings that Cloudflare's customers have decided on, based on the assumption of risk based on how you choose to access the web. Instead of pitching a fit at Cloudflare, encourage and promote positive views of Tor-based browsing, privacy-respecting browser settings, etc. There's an unfortunate reality that people want those Cloudflare settings because they stop a lot of malicious traffic, while allowing the vast majority of legitimate traffic. As we move the window of legitimate traffic to be more privacy-respecting, you'll see the boundaries of such behaviors are forced to adjust.
- techsupporter 5y ago
  > Instead of pitching a fit at Cloudflare, encourage and promote positive views of Tor-based browsing I don't know if the person to whom you are replying is using Tor, but I'm definitely not and I also despise how Cloudflare--or their customers, but I have no way of differentiating the two--reacts to various things. My home ISP is a very small outfit that mainly serves apartment buildings in my area. I don't know why, but every three or so weeks, Cloudflare decides that my ISP is a massive pile of risk and starts shunting almost every request I make through their "analysing your browser please be patient" screen. It's nothing specific to my computer because if I flip on a tunnel through my server in a colocation service in the same city as me, I get zero prompts. I've worked with my ISP and they've basically given me free reign to assign myself whatever public IP I want out of their /22 (as long as it's not in use by another customer, of course) and, during these times, any IP I choose gets the same response from Cloudflare. It's the same lack of transparency and being able to say "hey, what gives" that applies to spam filtering by the big e-mail providers or getting dropped into the "scam likely" bucket for mobile phone calls. I understand the need to filter and screen and protect but that doesn't mean I have to like it when it splashes onto me.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

The quotes at the end are excellent, they emphasize that your Microsofts and Googles of the world are going to try to throw their weight around to force the Internet to work the way works best for their business, rather than accepting a political reality, that the Internet is a communications medium, and laws are going to affect it differently in different countries, just as they do today for phone, mail, and any other medium.

vinay_ys 5y ago
Bigger companies are more compliant to the local laws than smaller companies. Simply because they have more to lose if the local government turns against them, they tread more carefully. Small companies can afford to fly under the radar just because they are small and likely catering to the fringe users and not to the masses.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  > Bigger companies are more compliant to the local laws than smaller companies. Sort of, but partly because those bigger companies are often the ones writing the laws. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. operate "public policy teams", whose goal is to push legislators to enshrine their business practices as law.
  - Mordisquitos 5y ago
    That may indeed be a factor, but it can happen even without active lobbying on the part of big business—all they need to do is sit back and let things flow. Be it in good faith or for cynical electioneering, lawmakers will introduce new regulatory requirements under the argument that they better protect the consumer or encourage a more competitive marketplace. However, the more complex these become, and the faster they change, the more it helps big business for they are the ones who can afford the legal teams and resources to keep track of them. Don't get me wrong, I'm nowhere near an economic laissez-fair libertarian, and I believe that strong regulation is necessary in many markets and industries. However, I'm also very wary of well-meaning but overly complex rules which do little but add a huge barrier to competition against the big players.

ignoramous 5y ago

The article doesn't talk about Cloudflare One, but I think that is a bigger opportunity than Edge computing in the short term, given the rise in ransomware attacks targeting tech-naïve institutions forced online due to the pandemic. Re: Edge: AWS has answers in Lambda at Edge (PoPs), Wavelength (5G Edge), and Local Zones (metro DCs); whilst Google has similar arrangements through its Anthos product line, if I'm not mistaken. Though, where Cloudflare shines is they architect their products to deploy and run from all locations around the world. Cloudflare also positions its ("global") products as being the simplest of all cloud providers to use. We stand to see how long they can remain as simple once they start ramping up on newer product lines and eventually have to support different integration points among them. The article points out that Matthew Prince, being a HBS graduate, quotes Clayton Christensen in his TechCrunch Disrupt Q&A; and from what little I gather, Andy Jassy comes from the same school of thought, as well [0]. I'm looking forward to more innovation from Cloudflare [1]. I've slowly moved all workloads that Cloudflare Edge could support out from AWS to it; only regret is AWS credits lay waste especially given we are pre-revenue. That said, Cloudflare's (limited) offerings are a better choice if you're a small engineering shop and couldn't be bothered with a gazillion bill items, IAM rules, and VPCs. [0] https://archive.is/tBpsj https://archive.is/tBpsj [1] ...and new-age cloud computing companies like railway.app, replit.com, darklang.com, stackpath.com, deno.land, vercel.com, fly.io to name a few.

redis_mlc 5y ago

> He said running a company is a bit like flying an airplane. You want to make sure it’s well maintained at all times. And that when you’re flying, you keep the wheel steady and the nose 10 degrees about the horizon. Yup, VC b.s. spotted. (You don't cruise with the nose 10 degrees above the horizon.)

Budabellly 5y ago

Good article, I feel people don't spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. The gap here for me is that AWS, GCP, and the like are perfectly equipped to build infra "from the edge in" as well. It's just not an advantage for Cloudflare -- I'd actually argue that AWS has the comparative advantage in building "from the edge in" given the clip at which they can turn out datacenters. With the new Outpost model as well, I don't see too many hurdles for AWS to just start deploying their whole feature set in any old colo, in any old country, in a matter of months. They do have to set their minds to it though. At the very least, they should definitely have their storage services in every country with actual data locality laws. I'm sure I'm missing something, but on the infra side I don't see what Cloudflare is better at in this regard. I'd also argue that AWS storage migration is just as good or better than Cloudflare's offering here. I won't comment on how users perceive/value each service because I don't use either much. What I definitely DO agree with, is that infra "from the edge in" is a major threat to existing public cloud business models. At the point where you have your whole stack portable from colo to colo (or, gasp, as a dAPP), it starts to sound more like public cloud as a library, rather than as a centralized managed service. Open source communities, unbundlers, and new-age cloud companies together will have a field day building 'library' versions of common cloud services and I think Cloudflare will pair nicely at that point. The question is when that becomes a reality.

daxfohl 5y ago
An outpost/local_zone still has to have a home region that serves as the primary control plane IIUC, so I don't think that would be applicable here. (That said, I think given their experience deploying to China, meeting GDPR, etc, and their focus on whatever it takes to make money, AWS and others should have no problem figuring out a solution to local regulations if that's what it ends up coming down to. That's far more likely than enterprises deciding to restructure everything they do around Cloudflare Workers, or Cloudflare becoming a full cloud platform.)
- Budabellly 5y ago
  Agree, especially with the concession. "Big Cloud" is best equipped to deal with forthcoming regulations. Outpost may be local zones today (needs fact check), but maybe a better question is what is the minimum service threshold for AWS to deploy a new "global zone". Considering data locality is the topic at-hand, I would surmise it's not that much and that Big Cloud can handily deploy new global zones at the rate that these new regulations crop up. Totally separate topic -- but my other thought is these laws are totally at odds with the decentralization trend. Not sure how FileCoin, Sia, Storj et al are thinking about this... maybe building the decentralized storage _protocol_ is the escape hatch, but maybe not.

the_duke 5y ago

I recently tried out Workers. The tooling, documentation and language integration is rather awkward and cumbersome at the moment. Sparse documentation, language tooling that seems very half baked, workflows don't feel intuitive. But there is definitely potential.

kylegill 5y ago
I had a similar experience. I tried installing some of their CLI tools and was met with some undocumented errors I didn't want to bother digging through code to figure out. > But there is definitely potential. I agree! It's something I'm watching with eager eyes, but don't feel like is the first option I'd turn to when making a technology choice. Another technology that gives me this feeling is FaunaDB [0]. [0]: https://fauna.com/ https://fauna.com/
csomar 5y ago
There is lots of potential. I'm working on a startup idea around Cloudflare at the moment. Here is something that can help with Cloudflare horrible tooling: Use wasm/Rust. You'll be able to compile and run most of your code locally, and then when you deploy you have more odds of your code not bugging on the cloud.
- stefan_ 5y ago
  Feels a lot like uploading PHP via FTP. The world moved on, I expect to test this stuff locally and if it breaks because of screwed up vendor tools, there better be source code.
  - csomar 5y ago
    It is PHP via FTP with a key-value database. The difference is that you have no server to manage and your code is deployed to hundreds of locations.
ryan29 5y ago
I have something fairly simple I’m going to build to try out workers. The getting started docs seemed ok to me. I would love to have a local runtime so I could iterate faster.

johnklos 5y ago

The article neatly ignores the reality that Cloudflare is a shitty company that wants to lock everyone possible in as much as possible, that wants to re-centralize the Internet, that wants to become a monopoly. For every product or service they create, ask yourself this: if taken to the logical conclusion where a majority of people use Cloudflare, do their products help the world, or do their products help them? Do they help the world to their detriment, or do they help Cloudflare to the detriment of the world? Anyone except fanbois will realize that re-centralization will only hurt the world and will only help Cloudflare, no matter which service or product it is. They're a shitty company with shitty, dishonest, disingenuous people who spout bullshit and make money off of scammers and spammers. I don't think that's going to change any time soon. I, for one, am tired of seeing constant Cloudflare propaganda and masturbation on this site.

yannoninator 5y ago
Do you have an alternative to Cloudflare if they are that bad?
- johnklos 5y ago
  How about NOT Cloudflare? You ask as if they provide services that can't be found elsewhere.
  - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
    I mean they kind of do at-least for free? What is your alternative so linking to a site from this site doesn't crash it without spending a good bit more money than needed every month?
- deleted 5y ago
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wmf 5y ago
Boycotting centralized stuff because it's more efficient isn't going to work, so if you want to avoid the Cloudflarepocalypse you need to work on making decentralized systems competitive.

paxys 5y ago

That last bit about politics/laws is exactly where I fear the internet will be a decade or two from now. Virtual borders will be controlled by nations as strictly as physical ones. Every byte going in or out will be monitored and regulated. "Removing [xyz] from the internet" will be a matter of a government clicking a button rather than the laughable scenario it is today. And they will be assisted every step of the way by companies like Cloudflare, Amazon and Microsoft.

zsims 5y ago
Isn't this expected? The "real world" is heavily regulated but the internet is open and free (not always in a good way). It makes it really difficult to deal with crime, cyber warfare, and illicit content. We need "something."
- judge2020 5y ago
  I think people have enjoyed the Wild West of the Internet long enough for governments to want to put a stop to it proactively instead of retroactively, although I don’t think it necessarily should be done.
rawtxapp 5y ago
I'm a little more optimistic in that I think decentralized networks will disrupt all these centralized monopolies (ex: imagine a social network where you own your data and can access it through various frontends, rather than one company owning it all). Hopefully, all the rewards will also get re-distributed back to participants in the network rather than one entity. People are starting to realize what happens when a central entity can just "cancel" you and as that keeps happening more often (ex: youtubers getting de-monetized, people getting locked out of their google accounts, Trump twitter cancellation, etc), people will be pushed to these un-censorable decentralized alternatives.
- markc 5y ago
  Like this?: https://skapp.hns.siasky.net/#/apps/all https://skapp.hns.siasky.net/#/apps/all

daxfohl 5y ago

Their local governance situation is much easier because their platform only does like two and a half things. Once they add enough to become a full fledged cloud provider that an enterprise can lift and shift their SAP and Oracle bare metal servers and whatever else onto with guaranteed performance and availability SLAs, then they're in the same boat. Until they do that, they'll continue to be a niche player for things that fit those two and a half use cases. It's not like enterprises are going to rewrite all their enterprise apps around Workers. I think this is just a matter of people getting tired of the self-driving cars story, and a reach for some other reason to pump up share values.

svara 5y ago

I don't quite understand the point that latency doesn't matter much outside of niche applications. If you're using TCP, bandwidth depends on latency, and surely no one thinks bandwidth isn't important? This totally does matter in the hundreds-of-milliseconds range, you can use one of the online calculators to confirm this. The other thing is that live video/audio isn't niche at all. Cloudflare could prioritize latency-sensitive traffic like that within its network, and deliver it as close to the users as possible on their respective ends. Am I missing something?

seangrogg 5y ago
While you're correct to think that latency does indeed matter, I think what the article is trying to point out is that very few services are latency sensitive beyond what is traditionally expected. In many applications, there are certain expectations of performance around certain actions, sure. That said, if things go long the user may get annoyed but they won't be deterred. But in some cases, having anything but the highest regard for latency is not only a deterrence, it's basically completely unacceptable to the user. Sure, you want your blog to load fast. But if your blog takes 300ms or 900ms very few people are going to notice the difference despite the 3x disparity. You're unlikely to get a nastygram on Twitter about your blog being unusable. Hell, even websites that take greater-than-one seconds to load are routinely not taken to task by the average user because, quite frankly, while fast is nice it's not a need. But apply that to a competitive, real-time game and if your service takes 70ms RTT for one of the roughly several hundreds of thousands of commands issued to it over the course of a 20 minute span you're performing about average. At 250ms - dramatically less than the kind of latency bound available to a blog post - you're rapidly approaching "completely unplayable" and going to get nasty responses.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  I think a lot of webapps undervalue low latency. I remember when Microsoft was talking about Surface research once and said that most people could start to notice latency >20ms. I think talking about the modern web in milliseconds doesn’t represent the way it really is. Based on my experience everything is measured in seconds and UIs are awful compared to what we had 10-20 years ago. It’s like the old green screens that adept users could outperform, but with better graphics and no buffer/command queue.

Animats 5y ago

But given the nature of the internet, isn’t that the whole problem? Because, anyone in Germany can go to any website outside of Germany. That’s the way it used to be, I’m not sure that’s going to be the way it’s going to be in the future. Uh oh. He might be right.

ableal 5y ago
In my corner of Europe (Portugal), sites can get blocked at (ISP supplied) DNS resolution. I think it's by court order, under a law passed a few years ago. Mostly for copyright reasons, and circumventable by switching to Google or similar DNS, for those in the know - it's not the great firewall, but it does prevent "anyone" from going to "any website" right now.

fossuser 5y ago

> "And you can manage that okay. You can manage on a per country basis. You feel good about that? > "Sure. I mean, for us, that’s easy. And then we can provide that to our customers as a function of what we’re doing. But I think that if you could say, German rules don’t extend beyond Germany and French rules don’t extend beyond France and Chinese rules don’t extend beyond China and that you have some human rights floor that’s in there." I'd be curious about that human rights floor. It's one thing to follow laws in a western democratic country with elections and rule of law, but it's another to do so in countries without elected governments or rule of law. It sounds like they're thinking about this since he explicitly mentioned the human rights floor, so that's good at least. > "Right. But given the nature of the internet, isn’t that the whole problem? Because, anyone in Germany can go to any website outside of Germany. > "That’s the way it used to be, I’m not sure that’s going to be the way it’s going to be in the future." This makes me sad, I hope we don't end up in a highly nationalized intranet style future but it does seem like things are trending that way (unfortunately).

wyager 5y ago
A highly nationalized internet is the inevitable consequence of national and supranational government orgs making demands that extend to companies or users beyond their jurisdiction. HN, disappointingly, seems to support a lot of these measures when it’s a “good guy” (like Germany or the EU) doing it to a “bad guy” (like Facebook), but seems to miss the broader implication. If the internet is going to remain an open and fully connected global network, it’s absolutely necessary that internet entities don’t need to worry about the laws of some country halfway around the world. The alternative is, at best, every website being IP-locked to a small set of countries. Either self-censored to countries that sites feel legally safe exposing themselves to, or censored by governments at transnational network boundaries.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > don’t need to worry about the laws of some country halfway around the world. For me, the DCMA is the laws of a country halfway around the world, that the US tries damn hard to enforce on other countries.

mjgs 5y ago

Cloudflare edge workers are pretty awesome for a lot of use cases. I was a bit disappointed that the article doesn’t really talk about the tech, felt like quite a lot of waffle. It’s great for inserting data into a page, because it runs on super fast connections, and means the data is already in the page when it gets to users, there’s no waiting for the browser to fetch and hydrate data into the page, so the UX is awesome. And security is great too because you don’t need to store any access keys in the browser, instead have these in env variables in Cloudflare.

deleted 5y ago
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uptownhr 5y ago

Cloudflare partners with spacex to deliver edge capabilities to the moon and beyond

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

>>> Jurisdictional Restrictions make it easy for developers to build serverless, stateful applications that not only comply with today’s regulations, I'm interested to hear from anyone from fly.io on this - if Inunderstand it their approach is very amenable to this as well - at the simplest level all my app needs is an environment setting telling me which data centre i happen to be running in. then i can start doing whatever regulations I need to.