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Cloudflare's Disruption
- raywu 5y agoGood write up. Classic Christensen.
- jgrahamc 5y agoWhen I joined Cloudflare in 2011 Matthew recommended the book. I bought "The Innovator's Dilemma", read it, and said to myself "OK, we'll do that then".
- bithavoc 5y agoAny other book you think has been critical to Cloudflare's successful mindset?
- jgrahamc 5y agoGo Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans
- eastdakota 5y agoI used to give all new managers at Cloudflare Daniel Pink’s book “Drive.” Summary of a bunch of interesting research on what really motivates people.
- alberth 5y agoHi John Since you're here, would love for Cloudflare to disrupt the DBaaS marketplace. I already run my entire business on Cloudflare (for services you have) but there is a significant portion of my infrastructure (>50%) I haven't moved over that is dependent upon needing a DBaaS offering. With a DBaaS offering, I could run near 100% of my infrastructure on Cloudflare. (Workers KV is great btw, but there are so many times where just a traditional RDMS is needed that a key-value store doesn't fill).
- eastdakota 5y agohttp://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1442871038308618252 http://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1442871038308618252
- adventured 5y agoThat's an amazing compliment from Christensen. Give AWS hell Cloudflare, looking forward to using R2.
- raywu 5y agoOne of the best reads from Christensen, too. I refer to it often
- pbreit 5y agoWhy is it still so ridiculously difficult to put some DB-backed, servable, editable code up in the cloud?
- jerf 5y ago"More importantly, AWS itself is locked-in to its integrated approach: the entire service is architected both technically and economically to be an all-encompassing offering; to modularize itself in response to Cloudflare would be suicidal." Eh, somewhat. AWS is already modular in a lot of ways. You want S3? You got it, no matter where you are. (We're talking after them doing some sort of fee drop here.) You want to run exactly one EC2 instance? No problem. You want a message queue? You don't need anything else. You can integrate it with the notification service but it's optional. Sure, some of their services are integrated, but a lot of that integration is just "this service pulls from S3 and writes to S3", not massive integration at every level. There is some stuff that is deeply tied in, yeah. But it's not like every single AWS service is deeply tied into half the other ones and the moment you open an EC2 instance you also are buying into a dozen other services. (It may feel like it if you put together a network and override the default block storage, but that's really just giving you knobs that are simply preset elsewhere, not really "lockin".) A lot of it is already pretty modular.
- H8crilA 5y agoYou forgot about the egress fees. Try running BigQuery on a (big) dataset stored in S3. You probably wouldn't even think of that because of how stupid that is at the moment.
- jasode 5y ago>Try running BigQuery on a (big) dataset stored in S3. Seems like a pathological use case to run a query engine on one cloud provider datacenter (Google) against the disk storage at another cloud provider (Amazon). Even if egress were $0, I still wouldn't want to do that. I want queries to run as fast as they can and the WAN link bandwidth is opposed to that. Is there anything about BigQuery that would compel anyone to do that instead of just using AWS RedShift?
- paunchy 5y agoKeep in mind that most of the big three regions are located in the same metro area, often times right across the street from one another. They have private network peering that circumvents WAN circuits, your data is literally transiting between ethernet ports on the same switch. So generally speaking, latency and bandwidth between services is not a significant concern. It's all about egress billing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eruleman 5y agoA great example of counter-positioning. Cloudflare is positioning itself in the market in a way that its competitor (AWS) cannot replicate — their lock-in is predicated on egress fees.
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoOracle was to Amazon what Amazon will be to Cloudflare.
- tyingq 5y agoIt feels like if they released a serverless/Lambda equivalent they would start taking a lot of business from the big 3. Workers are somewhat close, but the v8/isolate pattern limits them to narrower use cases. A more traditional serverless that could sit at the center and be optionally fronted by Workers would be nice.
- gervwyk 5y ago100% agree with this. Running docker images on serverless is really great and allows you to deploy your environment to any provider with minimal effort. would be cool if they can add something like this, even if it does not provide 0s startup time..
- cholmon 5y agoCloudflare acquiring fly.io would be interesting to see.
- throwaway1777 5y agoI wonder how this relates to 5G which also pushes more storage and even compute to the edge.
- frakkingcylons 5y agoWouldn’t edge infra be more important for slower cellular connections?
- Vecr 5y ago5G has lots of latency compared to fiber or even good cable, if you want the same latency as someone on fiber to a regionally hosted server, you need edge compute stuff.
- ksec 5y ago> The service will be called R2 — “one less than S3,” quipped Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in an interview with Protocol ahead of Cloudflare’s announcement Oh I never thought of that. So the next one is Q1 and final one would be P0.
- turbonoobie 5y agoIt’ll be interesting to see Pirelli taking a market share in the cloud.
- throw_away 5y agoInteresting, too, as the unreleased pre-cursors to S3 were called first S5, and then S4.
- discodave 5y agoYou mean T4 and U5! Oh wait, pretty sure those are EC2 instance types. :p
- jamesfinlayson 5y agoWhat did the extra S's stand for?
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoNever heard of S5. S4 stood for Simple Server-Side Storage. Source: at AWS 2008-2014.
- rsj_hn 5y agoSecure Simple Server-Side Storage is still on the backlog :P
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throw_away 5y ago
- janandonly 5y agoAfter reading this I felt the urge to buy Cloudflare stocks... anyone else as well?
- zz865 5y agoThey're a progressive company, but price wars are generally not a profitable place to be.
- ignoramous 5y agoDisruption happens at the low-end of the market, by definition.
- linuxftw 5y agoSame. I'm already long since shortly after the IPO, obviously I wish I invested much more. The passage about fixed bandwidth costs due to relationships with ISPs really resonated with me. Wish I worked for them and was getting those sweet, sweet RSUs.
- eastdakota 5y agohttps://cloudflare.com/careers https://cloudflare.com/careers
- Wintereise 5y agoIs CF open to hiring remotely, or are you guys only open to considering onsite applications?
- prdonahue 5y agoWe're hiring remotely for most roles these days, so long as you reside in a country where we're set up to hire people (tax presence, etc.).
- wp381640 5y ago
- julianlam 5y agoI find it deliciously ironic that CloudFlare is eating AWS' lunch with their launch of R2, after Amazon did basically the same thing with a bunch of their services built upon open source projects. I suppose it's now corporations stealing market share from each other...
- formerly_proven 5y ago> I suppose it's now corporations stealing market share from each other... Uhm, what did you think a market is?
- mushbino 5y agoCorporations colluding to fix prices as high as possible?
- up6w6 5y agoI dont think CloudFlare R2 competing with AWS S3 is a fair comparasion to what Amazon did to open-source projects...
- wmfiv 5y ago"Eating AWS's lunch" seems quite speculative. R2 is a blog post. S3 is the industry standard to the extent that everyone else creates products based on a subset of the S3 API. S3 is also a cornerstone of the AWS ecosystems which has enormous gravitational pull. Cloudfare is an exciting company with a lot of great products. But they're less than 1% the size of AWS or Azure. Let's see what happens.
- m_ke 5y agoCloudflare could really shake things up on the ML side of things. The egress costs and GPU prices on AWS and GPC make them a nonstarter for most companies, forcing people to rack their own hardware.
- wmfiv 5y agoMost companies except the ones paying AWS/Azure/GCP a combined $100B+ per year and growing fast?
- m_ke 5y agoYes except for the ones that are lighting saudi money on fire by having softbank pay for it. A lot of ML startups end up buying hardware for training because they can get a GPU for what it would cost them to rent it for 2 months on GCP/AWS.
- wmfiv 5y agoThat sounds right about ML startups. But ML startups or even venture funded companies are a very small percentage of companies - especially when it comes to spending signficant dollars.
- m_ke 5y agoMy original comment was referring to companies who train their own machine learning models. They might not be spending the way large slow corporations and the government do but there's a lot of investment in the space and a ton of room for growth.
- mcherm 5y agoThe company I work for is one example (of MANY) that is finding it quite cost effective to host on AWS as compared to maintaining our own data center. That being said, I certainly wouldn't mind seeing AWS and Cloudflare get into a price war that lowered egress prices.
- jiveturkey 5y ago> Hotel Seattle
- 72f988bf 5y ago> S3's margin is R2's opportunity Indeed, it looks like "your margin is my opportunity" motto can work both ways for Amazon :)
- manquer 5y agoWell customers and users eventually benefit.
- muttantt 5y agoCloudflare is incredibly undervalued as a public company.
- el_nahual 5y agoKind of. It's undervalued in the sense that it's a growing business that will probably track "the growth of the internet" (so, will continue growing for a long, long time). It's not undervalued in that quarterly revenue are $152.4 million, on a market cap of $35 billion dollars, for a staggering multiple of 57 times revenue. Edit: Had quarterly earnings instead of revenue.
- adventured 5y agoBy earnings I take it you mean revenue or sales, based on the rest of the text about the revenue multiple. Typically earnings refers to profit in one form or another (often it means after-tax profit, sometimes operating profit). Cloudflare of course has no earnings. Their operating loss last quarter was $28.8 million. Their operating loss for the past four quarters was $106 million. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earnings.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earnings.asp
- el_nahual 5y agoCorrect, edited my comment to show revenue. I'm old enough to remember a time when an "undefined" P/E ratio would have raised eyebrows.
- H8crilA 5y agoWow, that pricing and the amount of hype around the co really makes me want to short it, looks very asymmetric (good case already priced in with a huuuge range of possible outcomes). Not gonna do it though, learned my lesson with Tesla, there is always a better than best case waiting to get priced in.
- wmfiv 5y agoIt's priced at almost 100x revenue.
- tommek4077 5y agoHow was it ever possible for S3 to take such a market share. Or is this market share not existing? Coming from the 90ies I could never imagine paying for outgoing traffic when already paying for a server with internet connection. There was a.early time where you would get throttled to 100MBit (and much earlier in time to 10MBit/s) but this is long gone. What do you do with S3 that such prices seem fair for anything other than rarely accessed files?
- Macha 5y agoFor one, you only get billed for outgoing traffic from AWS. So if all your infra is on AWS, you're not paying for that. Secondly the ease of use is a lot compared to back when you had to buy a bunch of servers to put hard drives in - remember s3 was one of the first aws services, alongside ec2. If your load wasn't high, cause you're a startup or whatever, then paying the extra premium on the storage to save the engineering effort of building your own storage cluster worked out. Then when you were big, those egress costs had you locked out. Plus add in thoughts about having to maintain infra vs aws do it for you and you had a lot of developer blogs/marketing sites of tech companies/whatever just serve on s3 since it was easy to use and the absolute cost for such a product is low enough that they didn't care about the relative cost of s3 vs other services.
- tommek4077 5y agoVirtual servers are a thing since ... forever on the Internet. At least since mid-nineties you had not to think about getting hard drives into servers, if you would not wanted to.
- Macha 5y agoVPSes were usually not cost effective either if what you wanted was a big pool of storage space. The big growth opportunity for S3 was the companies that would otherwise run their own SANs, not the startup that was going to run on a couple of VPSes or shared hosting otherwise. Even the startups that grew, they might start on a VPS provider, but outgrow them. S3 managed to scale with them and retain them as customers.
- mathattack 5y agoThe egress costs are finally coming to light for CIOs and CFOs. (And pissing them off) Cloudflare has a lot to gain by fixing this. Fascinating company.
- xwdv 5y agoAnd the stock price is currently a buying opportunity.
- mathattack 5y agoAt 70-80x revenue it’s very tough to say.
- hncurious 5y agoYea, given that, it may already be priced in...
- xwdv 5y agoPeople are always saying stuff like this and I don’t think they understand, if you wait for a stock price to reach a smaller multiple of revenue, you’re probably too late to the party to make any big gains, and it will be no better than throwing your money into some ETF. AMZN used to be what, 3000x revenue? Would you have advised people not to invest in it back then? How would that turn out? At the end of the day, you can either sit on the side lines and criticize the prices, or you can jump in and make money.
- mathattack 5y agoI would have told people to buy the entire market rather than try to pick individual winners. :-)
- ReallyFantastic 5y agoAt its peak public valuation in March 1999, Amazon traded at 45x revenues…
- 5y ago
- bob-a-fet 5y agoCan we use R2 for video? Workers KV prohibit use for video. Video streaming is the #1 growth area since the pandemic. Why is it that we can use it and Workers KV to store images but not video (chunked) ?
- toredash 5y agoWhere is this limitation documented?
- notacoward 5y agoIf Cloudflare is able to do this now, why wasn't Akamai able to do exactly the same thing when AWS was still a baby? Serious question. Was it lack of vision? Poor execution? Technology or market just not ready yet? Without such an answer, we might have to consider the possibility that Cloudflare isn't any more able to do this than Akamai was.
- bedhead 5y agoAll of the above.
- kondro 5y agoWhen AWS was a baby charging around $0.10/GB for egress I had a quote sitting on my desk from Akamai wanting $1.50/GB for a minimum of 1TB per month. They were (are?) even more addicted to their egress charges.
- mrkurt 5y agoAnd midgress! Don't forget midgress.
- ignoramous 5y agoSounds like a neat name for fly.io managed pub-sub (jbor notwithstanding)...
- pxtail 5y agoI think that the key here is Cloudflare's approach: mainly working in the open - Akamai works kind of "behind the scenes", I don't think that developer working mainly for SMB is even able to try to evaluate their services, besides - just look at their website, it screams "big corps, talk to representative to learn about pricing" I think that big disadvantage in this approach is that they are not getting "mindshare", in contrast to that people are able to use Cloudflare serivces even for themselves and as they grow professionally CF's constantly increasing amount of solutions is there as something familiar, approachable and ready to use.
- 5y ago
- kureikain 5y agoCloudflare is truly amazing. They almost compete with everyone now. DNS: They eat simpledns lunch Pages: They eat Netlify lunch Worker: They eat serverless/lambda as in AWS/GCP lunch R2: They eat AWS Lunch And finally Email Forwarding: They eat ... my own lunch (I'm founder of hanami.run an email forwarding service) That's being said, from a user perspective, if my domain is already on CloudFlare, I can just host everything on it. Right now, cloudflare workers is pretty great to add some dynamic stuff. And pages is great for static site.
- rewma 5y ago> They eat serverless/lambda as in AWS/GCP lunch Aren't Cloudflare Workers a very specialized kind of lambda that's severely resource constrained and whose runtime is capped at 15ms? If anything Cloudflare Workers compete with Lambda@edge, but it's very disingenuous to compare them with AWS Lambdas and it's completely absurd to claim they eat anyone's lunch. Cloudflare Workers's usecase is extremely limited and specialized: run a script comprised of a couple lines of code that do not do much at all right at the edge. We're talking about things like adding a response header. Even then they are immediately killed if pretty much they don't exit immediately.
- dragonwriter 5y agoAren't Cloudflare Workers more comparable to AWS Lambda@Edge than regular Lambda?
- rewma 5y ago> Aren't Cloudflare Workers more comparable to AWS Lambda@Edge than regular Lambda? Yes that's my point. Unlike AWS Lambda, the usefulness of Cloudflare Workers is very specialized and narrow, like adding response headers or update a response document. AWS Lambdas on the other hand can run freely for over 15min, have virtually no limit in how much RAM they can use, and can be pushed as a Docker image with a max size of 10GB. If that is not enough, AWS Lambdas can be tied together into workflows with AWS step function. Therefore, for anyone to claim that Cloudflare Workers win over AWS Lambdas, either they have no idea what AWS Lambdas are or have no idea what Cloudflare Workers are.
- busymom0 5y agoThe post right about this post on HN's front page is titled "Slack is experiencing a service disruption". So for a second I thought CF was having some disruption (outage) which caused Slack to go down.
- dabinat 5y agoI thought I could save money by hosting some backend services in-house but soon realized it ended up being more expensive than EC2 solely because of the egress fees. So whether or not Amazon intended it that way, it functions as something that’s anti-competitive because it forces you to go all-in with AWS.
- aborsy 5y agoWould this compel AWS to eliminate or lower egress fees for S3?
- Aea 5y agoNot in a million years. The egress fees aren't just a profit center, they're a moat.
- aborsy 5y agoAWS Lightsail now offers S3 object storage with reduced egress fees: 250 GB storage, 500 GB transfer, 5$/month. With standard S3, that egress traffic would cost 45$ -50$. Sounds like AWS is competing with itself.
- judge2020 5y agoSounds like they want to capture the market standalone VPS providers have eaten, and I don't blame them. Not acquiring users for small-scale usage means they're less likely to consider you for large-scale usage. This is a large part of Cloudflare's success - the free tier is marketing for their Enterprise tier, and it really works.
- aborsy 5y agoIndeed, it uses pricing of the providers such as DigitalOcean, that charge $5 for 250GB storage and 1TB transfer.
- 57844743385 5y agoAmazon does not allow you to use lightsail as a back door for sneaking your data out at low cost.
- pjf 5y ago> Cloudflare’s unique advantages in a world where the Internet is increasingly fragmented Wait, it's the opposite, at least on the infrastructure side. The Internet is increasingly centralized, due to Cloudflare and other big players.
- vjust 5y agoI like this. AWS feels like a proprietary mainframe system (will get downvoted for saying this). Anytime a majority of developer job postings mention a specific product/company certifications, (think PMP, or Microsoft developer certs) , its time to pivot your skill sets.
- lanstin 5y agoNo, my first job was as an intern at IBM and my first non-intern computer job was in an AS/400 shop, and my last 2 years I've been an 'AWS Architect' and it's the same thing exactly - the guy with a good memory knows the entire IBM product line now knows all the obscure and bizarre AWS products. It's not just product certifications but even you end up building around arbitrary limits in the big company implementation rather than just modifying the open source code or adding glue layers to get what you want. I have had to write weird proxies just because of some missing AWS features, and it made sense because, unlike the last twenty years of my computing career, I don't have the source code to all of the code running in the environment.
- lanstin 5y agoBut yeah, if I were recommending options to a web group, I'd 100% tell them to use R2 and populate it object by object from S3. Although I suppose all the "it's ok to put this data into S3 with these controls" agreements will need to be redone for the new use case.
- kall 5y agoI‘m a fan of the fledgling CF stack but it‘s arguably more proprietary. You can‘t run containers, you can‘t run a normal database, you have to architect the application exactly for their system.
- lugged 5y ago10%.. disrupted.
- aasasd 5y ago> It’s impossible to overstate the extent to which AWS changed the world, particularly Silicon Valley. Without the need to buy servers, companies could be started in a bedroom, creating the conditions for the entire angel ecosystem and the shift of traditional venture capital to funding customer acquisition for already proven products, instead of Sun servers for ideas in Powerpoints. So the author thinks that shared hosting or servers-for-rent did not exist before AWS' popularity?
- andrewstuart 5y ago>> "The most familiar API for Object Storage, and the API R2 implements, is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3)." Ugh - a clone of S3's functionality - that's not competing. There's been zero innovation in cloud storage beyond S3's primitive capabilities. None of the competing services have gone beyond S3's stunted functionality. Online storage should provide: * An SFTP interface (and no, Amazon's "charge by the hour SFTP interface to S3" doesn't count) * The ability to query and apply filters to queries PLEASE! For goodness sake its 2021. * A webDAV interface * The ability to incorporate object metadata into filtering queries Why is there zero competitive drive in this space?
- chillfox 5y agoJoyent's Manta storage was quite nice, but unfortunately they closed down their public cloud.
- mrkurt 5y agoAPI compatible does not mean it's a clone. Cloud Flare's pitch is "multi-region storage that automatically replicates objects to the locations they’re frequently requested from." This is big and interesting and useful even if you ignore the bandwidth savings. If it were available already, we'd be trying to use it for Fly.io users.
- stevebmark 5y agoIn 2017 Cloudflare had an HTML parser bug that caused encrypted HTTP traffic to be leaked. Any website served by Cloudflare was vulnerable to having all of its traffic leaked into the HTML body response of the website that Cloudflare proxied. Given that Cloudflare is the proxy service for 80% of websites that use proxies, this affected a significant portion of the internet. Cloudflare served private HTTP traffic in response bodies, meaning that website results contained cookies, session data, encrypted traffic, all personally identifiable, and because it was served as response bodies, it was *indexed by search engines*, not to mention anyone else who was scraping websites during the time of the incident. It included credit card information, frames from videos, PII, the works, all linked to individual users. This was ongoing for *months.* Anyone savvy could use this information to hijack accounts, scrape personal information, view private browsing habits. Even when Cloudflare publicly announced it (and tried to blame others) when they thought they had cleaned up most of the data, you could still easily use search engines to find people's personal information by searching for the Cloudflare header strings that started the leaked session information. Many countries have legal policies around data breaches, including required disclosure policies and penalties. In the greatest blind eye turn of the history of the internet, Cloudflare managed to get away with a single blog post, and no other penalties. https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-caused-by-cloudflare-parser-bug/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-c... THAT is Cloudflare's disruption.
- lelandfe 5y agoMore reading from HN at the time, it wound up getting called "Cloudbleed"[0]: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13766339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13766339 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718720 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729517 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13721452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13721452 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed