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I know that Cloudflare is always very liked on HN and the CTO often comments here. I often refer to friends that Cloudflare only exists thanks to HN. But Cloudf

by polote 5y ago

I know that Cloudflare is always very liked on HN and the CTO often comments here. I often refer to friends that Cloudflare only exists thanks to HN. But Cloudflare is not (neither HN) the center of the world you could have better than R2 with B2 before for example. And no they didnt disrupted anything. You dont disrupt anything in one week actually. Has R2 had any impact on S3 business model or customers so far ? Probably not. Not saying Cloudflare is a bad company, I believe it is one of the few (maybe with Stripe) that is able to still work as a startup even though they have thousands of employees, which is quite impressive. But the article is clickbait

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
Agree obviously but I think the message is conveyed about what is interesting. They are competing everywhere CDN, Zero Trust / EdgeSec, Edge Computing, Hosting, etc... Anyone can think of any good historical good case studies on companies doing this in the past? Like becoming oversaturated, not focusing on one thing enough, or just growing like wild fire across spaces?
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  They seem to be massively diving into anything that can be computed/stored on the edge, and/or can benefit from a high performance network behind that edge. Which makes sense. Also, they make quite smart choices. An example of one very smart choice is that they don't do Docker for cloud computation, only Javascript/WebASM, and that means they can spin up code in Isolates in V8 that's much more lightweight than having all the infra needed to do Docker.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Having said that, said smart choice is also an alternative source of lockin, given their egress charges are minimal.
greatsaas12 5y ago
I think calling it clickbait is too harsh. The right headline would be: "Cloudflare announces 3 changes which have the potential to disrupt 3 industries in the near/long future". So it's somewhere in the middle between "totally describing what's inside" vs. clickbait-y.
- nuerow 5y ago
  > I think calling it clickbait is too harsh. The right headline would be: "Cloudflare announces 3 changes which have the potential to disrupt 3 industries in the near/long future". That's still quite the stretch. A pricing update to not charge egress fees for object storage and some types of streaming is hardly "disruptive", as is catering to the web3 buzzword. I like Cloudflare, but these marketing blurbs start to eat away the goodwill that Cloudflare's technical progresses earn with their hard and quality work.
  - lozenge 5y ago
    Note, the author isn't affiliated with Cloudflare. It's not a marketing blurb, this is how people actually talk in SV apparently ;)
    - greatsaas12 5y ago
      Doubt there's an affiliation. The whole article is written from a perspective of how founders can use these features to build their MVPs faster (curious how nobody in the comments mentioned this).
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    > A pricing update to not charge egress fees for object storage and some types of streaming is hardly "disruptive" Hum. Do you think the largest cloud providers can outcompete that without completely changing their business plans? Egress costs are always described as the ultimate cloud moat, and the main way those companies lock their clients. I do think there is enough space to disagree here (personally, I have no idea), but the mainstream view is that it fits the (econ-)dictionary definition of disruptive.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
You could say the same about Tesla. But cloudflare is able to scale fast at least.
acdha 5y ago
> And no they didnt disrupted anything. You dont disrupt anything in one week actually. Has R2 had any impact on S3 business model or customers so far ? Probably not. Cloud egress costs are the primary lock-in mechanism for cloud providers and that's been recognized as such for many years. This isn't the kind of thing which changes an industry in less than a week but I doubt you will want to defend this claim a year from now — Cloudflare is an established, rather popular company which many large organizations already trust and this gave them either significant savings or a big negotiating crowbar.
- manigandham 5y ago
  Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth and you can point the origin to whatever you want, including Backblaze which has free interconnect and cheaper pricing.
  - acdha 5y ago
    > Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth and you can point the origin to whatever you want. Not completely: if you used a ton of bandwidth (especially non-HTML/JSON) they'd want you to switch to a paid plan. Using an arbitrary origin server is similarly different, too: that means a lot more traffic coming back to your origin server unless all of your clients are located right next to each other hitting the same edge node. The mechanism they built to do an on-demand copy from S3 to R2 once and serve all subsequent requests from the replicated R2 copy should use substantially less bandwidth and will be faster for all of the requests received from clients which are closer to one of the R2 replicas than your origin server.
  - Strom 5y ago
    > Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth Only for HTML content. [1] That is the real disruption here. -- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682885
input_sh 5y ago
> I believe it is one of the few (maybe with Stripe) that is able to still work as a startup even though they have thousands of employees, which is quite impressive. You wouldn't call it impressive if you had to wait >24h for a support response as a user with an enterprise package. I'd call it quite the opposite from my experience with them at my previous job.

by polote 5y ago

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago

Agree obviously but I think the message is conveyed about what is interesting. They are competing everywhere CDN, Zero Trust / EdgeSec, Edge Computing, Hosting, etc... Anyone can think of any good historical good case studies on companies doing this in the past? Like becoming oversaturated, not focusing on one thing enough, or just growing like wild fire across spaces?

robertlagrant 5y ago
They seem to be massively diving into anything that can be computed/stored on the edge, and/or can benefit from a high performance network behind that edge. Which makes sense. Also, they make quite smart choices. An example of one very smart choice is that they don't do Docker for cloud computation, only Javascript/WebASM, and that means they can spin up code in Isolates in V8 that's much more lightweight than having all the infra needed to do Docker.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Having said that, said smart choice is also an alternative source of lockin, given their egress charges are minimal.

greatsaas12 5y ago

I think calling it clickbait is too harsh. The right headline would be: "Cloudflare announces 3 changes which have the potential to disrupt 3 industries in the near/long future". So it's somewhere in the middle between "totally describing what's inside" vs. clickbait-y.

nuerow 5y ago
> I think calling it clickbait is too harsh. The right headline would be: "Cloudflare announces 3 changes which have the potential to disrupt 3 industries in the near/long future". That's still quite the stretch. A pricing update to not charge egress fees for object storage and some types of streaming is hardly "disruptive", as is catering to the web3 buzzword. I like Cloudflare, but these marketing blurbs start to eat away the goodwill that Cloudflare's technical progresses earn with their hard and quality work.
- lozenge 5y ago
  Note, the author isn't affiliated with Cloudflare. It's not a marketing blurb, this is how people actually talk in SV apparently ;)
  - greatsaas12 5y ago
    Doubt there's an affiliation. The whole article is written from a perspective of how founders can use these features to build their MVPs faster (curious how nobody in the comments mentioned this).
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  > A pricing update to not charge egress fees for object storage and some types of streaming is hardly "disruptive" Hum. Do you think the largest cloud providers can outcompete that without completely changing their business plans? Egress costs are always described as the ultimate cloud moat, and the main way those companies lock their clients. I do think there is enough space to disagree here (personally, I have no idea), but the mainstream view is that it fits the (econ-)dictionary definition of disruptive.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

You could say the same about Tesla. But cloudflare is able to scale fast at least.

acdha 5y ago

> And no they didnt disrupted anything. You dont disrupt anything in one week actually. Has R2 had any impact on S3 business model or customers so far ? Probably not. Cloud egress costs are the primary lock-in mechanism for cloud providers and that's been recognized as such for many years. This isn't the kind of thing which changes an industry in less than a week but I doubt you will want to defend this claim a year from now — Cloudflare is an established, rather popular company which many large organizations already trust and this gave them either significant savings or a big negotiating crowbar.

manigandham 5y ago
Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth and you can point the origin to whatever you want, including Backblaze which has free interconnect and cheaper pricing.
- acdha 5y ago
  > Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth and you can point the origin to whatever you want. Not completely: if you used a ton of bandwidth (especially non-HTML/JSON) they'd want you to switch to a paid plan. Using an arbitrary origin server is similarly different, too: that means a lot more traffic coming back to your origin server unless all of your clients are located right next to each other hitting the same edge node. The mechanism they built to do an on-demand copy from S3 to R2 once and serve all subsequent requests from the replicated R2 copy should use substantially less bandwidth and will be faster for all of the requests received from clients which are closer to one of the R2 replicas than your origin server.
- Strom 5y ago
  > Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth Only for HTML content. [1] That is the real disruption here. -- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682885

input_sh 5y ago

> I believe it is one of the few (maybe with Stripe) that is able to still work as a startup even though they have thousands of employees, which is quite impressive. You wouldn't call it impressive if you had to wait >24h for a support response as a user with an enterprise package. I'd call it quite the opposite from my experience with them at my previous job.