20 ms·

AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go

797 points by pimterry 5y ago

michaelbuckbee 5y ago
Just wanted to point out that you can in fact install Cloudflare on your mobile phone: https://blog.cloudflare.com/1111-warp-better-vpn/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/1111-warp-better-vpn/
- lucasverra 5y ago
  Mmm too much wording for a big-tech overlord free product. I've used nextdns.io as a "free & limited" and now paying customer. Get rid of trackers and ads by dns, I get to give them 20usd/year, so I know that their business model should not be to resell my data. There is an affiliate link to give if you are interested. iOS app and great UI in the web.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    The lead-in is about the 1.1.1.1 dns product, but the bulk of the article is about the VPN/accelerator, Warp.
- swyx 5y ago
  dear god. of course they have an app. will update! thanks michael :)
agomez314 5y ago
Can someone share a link that describes Clay Christensen's thought or analysis on his management style? Watching Prince explain the Innovator's Dilemma piqued my interest
- mattferderer 5y ago
  He has written for Harvard Business Review for decades - https://hbr.org/search?N=516164&Ns=publication_date%7C1&Ntt=clayton+m.+christensen#browse-reports-filter https://hbr.org/search?N=516164&Ns=publication_date%7C1&Ntt=... I believe some reviewers of his book say that the book is his HBR writings organized into a book. In case you're not aware there is the actual book Clay wrote as well - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
rsmets 5y ago
I consider Clouflare to be the least reliable cloud service provider out there. So many CDN and DNS related outages thanks to poor engineering release practices. Considering those are their bread and butter services I wouldn't ever rely on any of their other services.
- qaq 5y ago
  Do they have more outages than AWS or GCP?
- ehPReth 5y ago
  Do they?
- gfosco 5y ago
  Enterprise CloudFlare customer here, can't remember a single disruption or outage in the last year.
  - AtNightWeCode 5y ago
    It is simply incorrect. We have most of our customers on Cloudflare and the larger customers are on enterprise deals. My only criticism to Cloudflare is simply that it is just not as stellar as some of the more expensive alternatives. It is not a high end service but still the right choice for a lot of sites.
- judge2020 5y ago
  When it happens, it breaks a lot of the internet, but "so many" is stretching it - the entire CF network has only gone down a couple of times in the time I've known about them (~6 years).
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    They went down at least 4 times last year. Always noticeable as Discord will go down.
    - 5y ago
jgrahamc 5y ago
Amusingly, I really never enjoyed playing chess, but have always enjoyed Go.
- azemetre 5y ago
  You should look up a game called Hive. I like to think of it as a "modern" chess. Games typically last 10-30 minutes and has just as much complexity and strategy (in my opinion) as chess.
tromp 5y ago
Minor quibbles about game remarks: Contrary to what the article claims, draws in chess are very common (on the other hand, they're exceedingly rare in Go, and often impossible due to fractional komi). Sente in Go does correspond to having the initiative, but a move that compels a player into a particular follow-up move should be called a "kikashi" (forcing move).
- elzbardico 5y ago
  I'd even say that when playing black against someone of roughly the same or higher level than you, a draw is your goal.
  - jacobsenscott 5y ago
    White's advantage is so small - this is only true at the very highest levels of play.
- raziel2p 5y ago
  Draws are extremely common in high level play, and statistics don't seem to exist for all levels of play, but I'm willing to guess that it's fairly uncommon across all games of rating 1600 or higher.
  - danielbarla 5y ago
    I agree that publicly available large datasets / statistics become fairly rare below the 1600, above that level they are fairly common. But anecdotally, I once messed around with a bunch of large datasets for the purpose of comparing high-level play to lower ones, and the statistics weren't spectacularly different. Yes, the results are essentially far more random the lower you go (especially below 1800, where play is essentially a lot less accurate), but draws are still fairly common at the 1600 level. If memory serves, top-level games had around two-thirds end in a draw, while at the 1600 level, it was basically down to one third. Not what I would call uncommon, though certainly no longer the dominant result.
  - kmm 5y ago
alisonkisk 5y ago
The chess/go analogy is so weak it's misleading. The claim is that Amazon competes on a per-service basis, while CloudFlare is competing by flanking with related services. It doesn't really make sense.
jpgvm 5y ago
Sandstorm lives on. :) s/grains/durable-objects/ etc but hey, it's still all here. Would love to get a blog post or talk on the journey if you are lurking kenton.
- ryukafalz 5y ago
  Yeah, though durable objects are a great idea I do wish they weren't proprietary. I hope they get enough traction to spur the development of a self-hostable FOSS competitor though. (Ideally one that's interoperable with it!)
  - judge2020 5y ago
    If it helps, the concept is super-simple and reimplementing such a service won't be hard if anyone tries to make it interoperable with Workers. Miniflare (a dev environment for Workers) implements it in just over 200 loc[0], with the only backend beint Workers KV for data storage (<500 loc if you count that). 0: https://github.com/cloudflare/miniflare/blob/master/src/modules/do.ts https://github.com/cloudflare/miniflare/blob/master/src/modu...
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  But, does Cloudflare gives back control to the user? (like Sandstorm does) I think the spiritual successor of Sandstorm is Tim Berners-Lee's Solid https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/ that was recently cited in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903601 But, while Sandstorm is all about compartmentalizing access to data in a single server, having the document (grain) as its unit, Solid does this with multiple servers (called pods)
  - jpgvm 5y ago
    Fair. Sandstorms technical ideas are well represented in Cloudflares product lineup now but not yet it's philosophy. Maybe some of that will change some day. I wasn't aware of Solid, going to check it out!
  - 5y ago
asim 5y ago
I'm a huge cloudflare fan. Massive advocate for them but when I do see this talk of them as a new kind of cloud platform I cringe a little. Are we going to under go the same lock-in like experience we've had over the years by using very bespoke closed sourced systems like workers and durable objects. It's one thing to buy into something that does have wide portability like a postgres but much harder to buy into the platforms that aren't open source.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Should’ve sounded the alarm 15 years ago when S3 was invented.
  - asim 5y ago
    So the interesting thing, back then I think we were willing because of the nascent state of cloud services. We hadn't fully bought into any of this because most were still just buying hardware or renting servers and building their own software. S3 and EC2 were pretty pivotal in the move to this lock-in from a pure infrastructure perspective. Luckily s3 equivalent apis exist on every cloud provider now, its a staple cloud service but I think in 2021 as more things appear, they should be open source first. The open source companies start with that, I think cloud companies should actually open source the tech too.
- dgb23 5y ago
  They're smart about this. It's infrastructure lock-in but not at the API/application level, as they are trying to stay as close to "just JavaScript with browser API semantics" as possible. Deno is a project that does this too. If you know service workers and web workers you know Cloudflare Workers. If you know JS OO you know Durable Objects (to a degree). Think about it, the huge influx of web developers that have been growing up on just using JS. Look at their docs too. It's all very accessible, modern, low friction stuff all while they are selling us their infrastructure. And they communicate in a technical, programmer friendly way as opposed to the business/marketing jargon that we are used to by some of the others.
  - 5y ago
Joe8Bit 5y ago
Good article, thanks for submiting! The challenge for AWS is one lots of incumbents have experienced: they created a market and it's economics and now they're being attacked by the next generation of market entrants who've structured their businesses to _specifically_ attack those economics. What's interesting is that challenge can be a really big problem for incumbents, as those economics can form a core (very rigid) part of their operating model; it can make it VERY hard to address without fundamental (read: risky) change to a business. There aren't many examples of incumbent businesses doing it successfully, as it needs a kind of 'self-inflicted disruption' that's very hard to do in large organisations where politics and empire building can make it difficult. If someone could do Managed NAT Gateway next I'd appreciate it!
- jgrahamc 5y ago
  they created a market and it's economics and now they're being attacked by the next generation of market entrants who've structured their businesses to _specifically_ attack those economics https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244 https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan...
  - MauranKilom 5y ago
    Did you purposely link to it on Amazon? :)
  - Joe8Bit 5y ago
    Hah, thanks! My comment was fairly blatantly stealing from the book! It's so interesting from an incumbents internal POV (I saw it a few times during my time at McKinsey) as changing an organisations economics is often the unstoppable force that meets the immovable object of internal politics. There's a really interesting ongoing example of this in the the UK as 'attacker' banks (e.g. Monzo, Starling) challenge the economics of incumbents. It's not quite the same, as these attackers are removing back-end cost (e.g. branch networks) from an already 'free' product (e.g. retail banking) but it's meant that big banks are looking at their balance sheets and seeing a set of gaping money pits that will require fundamental change in their operating models to be able to get rid of/compete with.
pohl 5y ago
This reads as though the entire chess vs go conceit was meant only to bait eyes into making it all the way down to the last paragraph, which jumps the shark by dignifying Web3 nonsense.
losvedir 5y ago
I think the Go philosophy is probably healthier for an economy overall. I can't say whether that's really what's going on here with Cloudflare specifically, but it's an interesting way of framing the discussion. In particular, the thing that catches my eye is in the "Territory" section of the post, and the idea that in Go it's not "winner take all". A good Go player won't necessarily beat a less good one by a lot, but will consistently take more territory by the end. Or, as one of my Go strategy books put it: think about a kid cutting a brownie in half to share - they want to give themselves a bit more, but if you're too greedy and try to take a large fraction of it, mom won't let you and you'll end up losing out. I like the idea that in the economy, good ideas and good companies win more often, in that they get the most marketshare, but not necessarily by a lot.
- steve76 5y ago
  Chess player. Go. What are you? A child? Real world is not a game. Someone steps to you, drop them, drop them fast and drop them hard enough to bury them. What we lack is clarity, exactly where we are and who we are dealing with. Russian businessmen are known to launch a wave of terror in the face of competition, car bombings that blow up post offices and police stations. The Chinese just poisoned the world with a bioweapon over soybean tariffs. My advice to Amazon would be next space launch, don't launch one, launch a thousand. Build a monster of a launch pad on the moon. Anyone bothers you, crash asteroids on them and kill their entire country.
- InvaderFizz 5y ago
  > think about a kid cutting a brownie in half to share - they want to give themselves a bit more, but if you're too greedy and try to take a large fraction of it, mom won't let you and you'll end up losing out. We take a slightly different approach in my house. The person that divides the treat, gets last pick. It's very effective at getting the closest to equal distribution possible. The only time it falls apart is when I'm not particularly worried, so I haphazardly break the cookie in half and end up with 1/4 for myself.
igtztorrero 5y ago
"You can check-out any time you like ... but you can never leave! " That's why I choose Digital
_8j50 5y ago
How does their s3 replacement fare against backblaze b2?
- prirun 5y ago
  (Author of Hashbackup) B2 pricing is 0.5 cents/GB/mo, R2 is 1.5 cents/GB/mo. B2 egress is 1 cents/GB/mo with 1GB/day free, R2 is free. If your cloud storage is for backups, B2 is likely to be less expensive because backups are rarely downloaded and their 1GB/day of free egress is enough to do backup maintenance to optimize storage. Cloudflare's CDN can proxy a B2 bucket to get free egress and maybe faster downloads (haven't needed it myself): https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using-Backblaze-B2-with-the-Cloudflare-CDN https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using... I'm a big fan of B2 because: - they have low pricing - they have simple pricing - they don't use gimmicks: minimum storage time, minimum file size, minimum payment per month, etc. HashBackup was one of the first B2 integrations and I've never had problems with it.
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    Do remember that Cloudlfare's CDN is not meant to serve non-webpage content. They outline it in their ToS; section 2.8 here: https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ It is unlikely that this same restriction would apply to R2.
    - badinfo 5y ago
      Their CEO was on here the other day and said it doesn't apply to R2 or Workers, and that they needed to update their TOS: > (eastdakota) That limitation doesn’t apply to the R2 service or Workers generally. We’ll update and clarify our ToS. Thanks for flagging! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28683255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28683255
  - _8j50 5y ago
    Thank you. I was going to explore usage if R2 or B2 for elasticsearch "cold-index" storage. R2 seems more ideal for better egress.
liveoneggs 5y ago
akamai has had Netstorage ~forever so I wish I understood why this cloudflare product is such big news. AWS is just so much more
- cryptonym 5y ago
  Not the first feature to fall in that category. I do not think it's that big for the industry overall. Cloudflare is better at PR / more visible than Akamai. It might be interesting for markets where Akamai is not really competing (low budget?). S3 compatible API also is a plus.
  - liveoneggs 5y ago
    yeah I also seem to remember being able to deploy a JAR file directly to akamai in the early 2000's as well, although we never tried it for production
- pqdbr 5y ago
  I could answer your question a thousand different ways but, to be concise, go to akamai.com and find me the pricing of any service they sell.
  - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
    Pretty nice for Cloudflare that their closest competitor makes very little effort to gain customers, and actively avoids the hobbyist set which is key for mindshare.
- notyourday 5y ago
  Akamai netstorage was/is expensive, requires a contract and interacting with inept, overpaid and rather useless sales people and sales engineering that insist on coming to your office to yap about their awesomeness a-la IBM, and is a part of CDN which is also expensive and also requires a contract with more sales people and sales engineers that insist on coming to your offices to yap about their awesomeness. I cannot wait until someone finally puts Akamai out of its misery -- they stopped being an innovative company in 2000s.
noasaservice 5y ago
A different problem is that, at least with federal agencies, Cloudflare has a BAD name. Like unbelievably bad. They do have a FedRAMP offering as of this year.. But I've been on calls with agencies. Dept heads, executive yuck-de-yucks. And we've gotten, "Are you using Cloudflare?" We don't, and say so. Resoundingly, we get "GOOD" We have no clue what the story and history is there. It's bad for sure. And nobody will answer why. On the commercial end, this makes sense. But damn, egress from the majors suck. But that's roach motel computing...
- ren_engineer 5y ago
  probably the fact Cloudflare doesn't just shut down sites at the governments request. I'd also imagine a good chunk of them have been wined and dined by Oracle, Google, Microsoft, and AWS lobbyists to think that Cloudflare is bad. I doubt non-technical federal agency heads are double checking what they are being told
- rocqua 5y ago
  I know there was a lot of pressure on Cloudflare to drop hosting for 8chan. And it took a long time for Cloudflare to budge. In general, I could imagine there being pressure on those grounds against using Cloudflare.
- RNCTX 5y ago
  I'd wager that dept heads and executive yuck-de-yucks by and large only know what they heard from other dept heads and executive yuck-de-yucks, which is that Cloudflare didn't buy into the censorship-by-boardroom-committee plans of the two American political parties over the past few years.
- wp381640 5y ago
  Is see this as a positive for Cloudflare
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  Cloudflare’s priority is growth. They intentionally take on customer risk and technical risk to try to maximize growth. As a result they incline toward hosting whoever wants to use them, and moving fast and breaking things. Neither of these align with typical federal govt approach to IT infrastructure, which emphasizes reliability and avoiding known risk. It’s just a big personality mismatch, and there’s no reason for either to resolve it. Cloudflare doesn’t need the feds, and the feds don’t need Cloudflare, at least not commercially.
sudhirj 5y ago
The article makes no mention of the Cloudflare's enterprise networking tools, and its VPN. Cloudflare is basically in a position to run the internet for most people to buy into it - I have their VPN on my phone and computer, which gets my fast access inside their network. By fronting so many of the world's websites, a lot (maybe a majority?) of my traffic actually flows inside Cloudflare. Now with Workers, R2, Durable Objects, the server side can move to Cloudflare too. If it makes sense to move servers on the network where the clients are, then this is where they should go.
- breakingcups 5y ago
  That just makes it feel like a proprietary layer on top of the internet. Or, to draw it further into the scale you mention, a single-party replacement for the internet. Neither of these things sound like a long-term win.
  - sudhirj 5y ago
    No, they're both very short term wins for companies, which means they might happen anyway. Cloudflare has demonstrated ethical behaviour so far, but that's not enough to trust a single part with the internet. Short of the new age web3 stuff, though, not sure what else is a suitable alternative. Competitors to Cloudflare aren't as common because of their gigantic moat — imagine building an org that builds out to hundreds of cities around the world and partners with thousands of network companies.
    - breakingcups 5y ago
      Definitions of ethical may differ. Shielding far-right sites, cesspits like Kiwi Farms which make it their stated goal to drive people they don't like to suicide, criminals like DDOS vendors, credit card fraud forums, etc. all under the guise of being a "neutral passthrough layer third party" feels incredibly disingenuous to me. The aforementioned people are Cloudflare's customers and Cloudflare hosts their content (yes, sometimes with a short ttl, but the public IP address still terminates at their web servers). They can not be afforded the same leeway that actual internet exchanges are when routing traffic to bad actors. So no. They may have demonstrated business-friendly behaviour. But ethical? No.
deleted 5y ago
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dflock 5y ago
Cloudflare are very smart - and they have Second Mover Advantage.
fmajid 5y ago
No, AWS is playing Monopoly.
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  If that's what they're playing, they're doing a mediocre job of it. They should be forcing Microsoft and Google to rent their cloud services, then using high rents there to force them to sell their own cloud services to Amazon. Not likely to work out for them there. But, to your point, I'm sure they would if they knew how.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    I'm sure they all have some amount of critical backups on the other cloud providers' services.
- discodave 5y ago
  This is actually a great way to think about it for a number of reasons. 1. Look up what James Hamilton (AWS Distinguished Engineer) has been saying for years about commodity economics disrupting things. It's about the money, stupid. 2. The way AWS has been building out their ecosystem is following a lot of the previous monopolists (Microsoft) playbook. Get other companies to be 'partners' in your ecosystem so they depend on your platform? Check. Training and certification so technologists are tied to your platform? Check, and so on. 3. Amazon and AWS are usually never playing the game people think they are. For example, all the years that people questioned Amazons profits, they were doing their best to hide profits with massive R&D & other investments. In the case of CloudFlare attacking AWS network/bandwidth pricing, it's worth pointing out that >60% of AWS revenue comes from EC2!!!! S3, and CloudFront is (relatively) small fries.
lewisjoe 5y ago
As much as I like to have something else leading this market other than AWS (I hate them for several reasons, but insensitive billing plans, cockpit like interface and lock-in services are the top ones), I'd also hate to see Cloudflare become another AWS. Are there any tech disruption that will make computing resources affordable for solopreneurs/startups as they once used to be. For the past decade I've seen a very slow gradual decrease in the affordability of cloud computing cost. I trust WASM and WASI will have a huge effect in democratizing the market but I'm not sure yet.
- mooreds 5y ago
  > I've seen a very slow gradual decrease in the affordability of cloud computing cost. What do you mean by "cloud computing cost"? Digital Ocean will sell you a VPS for $5/month with 1TB bandwidth included. There are tons of hosting providers that offer something similar. These prices don't seem higher than they were 10 years ago. What am I missing?
  - lewisjoe 5y ago
    Yes but try running a couple of servers with a decent amount of ram say 4GB and we’d notice how the cost goes exponential. Point being running a couple of servers with a decent ram and a decent amount of storage shouldn’t cost 50$. It should be say, 7$. I know the ask is too much. Just want to see if there’d be any fundamental tech breakthrough to make something like this happen.
    - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
      A Linode VPS with 4GB RAM costs $20/month, 4 times more then the 1GB instance. Dedicated VM is $30/month for 4GB, but that's the smallest so can't compare there. But that's only a little bit more than the shared vps, so I'd consider it pretty reasonable. A few years ago I couldn't find a $5/month option. The cheapest Linode was $10/month. EDIT checked Wayback Machine...10 years ago, a 512MB RAM Linode cost $19.95/month.
    - wongarsu 5y ago
Alex3917 5y ago
> Meanwhile, when people think of "Tier 1" AWS services, its Cloudflare equivalent, Amazon CloudFront, rarely gets any love, and the official AWS Twitter account hasn't tweeted about it in almost a year. In the last couple years, CloudFront has gone from not really working to actually working very well. Invalidations are now instant, both from the command line and the CLI. You used to be unable to customize response headers, but now you can do that fairly easily. Maybe they're not publicly talking about it, but they've actually gone and fixed all the major problems.
bsedlm 5y ago
When thinking about how China came to dominate all manufacturing, it makes me wonder if China was playing Go and rest of the west was playing chess
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  I always imagined it was because China could pay their employees scraps and didn't care about workplace safety. No idea if that's accurate or not, though.
  - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
    It’s a bit of both. Lots of countries have low wages and lax safety protocols, but they haven’t been able to hit double digit gdp growth for decades because of that alone.
- opinion-is-bad 5y ago
  The book “On China” by Henry Kissinger makes almost that exact argument. Whatever your opinion on Kissinger, he opened relations with China and definitely has an interest viewpoint.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
Great writup and I love the Go vs. Chess metaphor (I am an avid Chess and Go player, including taking lessons from a South Korean Go Master). I feel a little guilty using so many free Cloudflare products, while paying them only a small amount of money for occasional upgrades. If I were building a serverless based startup, I would seriously consider them over GCP or AWS.
- antifa 5y ago
  > The big 3 clouds are playing Chess, but Cloudflare is playing Go. I think most lay people don't know the nuances between chess and go and would presume that chess is the more advanced game based on superficial first impressions. Probably not a good metaphor because I don't know the author's opinion on the games and most people will probably see the title and interpret it in opposite ways. Using "3D chess" instead would have been a more clear metaphor.
herostratus101 5y ago
"In Chess, you win when you take the King, which in effect has infinite point value, and it is relatively uncommon to come to a draw." Great article, but this guy clearly does not follow competitive chess. The vast majority of games end in a draw.
- minkzilla 5y ago
  You also don't "take" the king. The game ends one turn before you would be able to take it.
djbusby 5y ago
What blows my mind is that folk put Cloudflare in front of their AWS stack. Does one really need both?
- judge2020 5y ago
  This is often a business decision. Cloudflare's bandwidth is free, and with smart tiered caching my operation serves 6TB a month while only paying out 125gb of AWS egress (with extremely hot files).
  - infinitone 5y ago
    Wait can you please elaborate more? I have a site that gets a ton of traffic and my biggest bill is AWS cloudfront bandwidth... how can i reduce this using cloudflare?
    - oblio 5y ago
      Switch out Cloudfront for Cloudflare. Or put it in front of it, if that's what floats your boat.
- AtNightWeCode 5y ago
  Well, the currently most used paradigm for building web is that you see the edge servers as your classic web servers and then see the cloud as a service layer. Good for security and scaling. Maybe you can achieve the same thing within AWS.
gwbas1c 5y ago
[Meta] I love the custom scrollbar. Works seamlessly, and the chunky look is cool.
- yobert 5y ago
  It is cute. Wish it worked in firefox though!
  - mayli 5y ago
    Yeah, I could borrow that in my next website.
ameminator 5y ago
This guy definitely plays go - although I hope that screenshot from KGS was someone else's game.
Kalanos 5y ago
Amazon prides itself on the "race to zero cost" as a way to beat competitors. AWS will release a service with feature-parity at the same price and customers will default to that. so cloudflare is learning to play checkers poorly.
- Kalanos 5y ago
  Additionally, that AWS service will work with cloudtrail, cloudwatch, IAM, networking, and will get integrated into default APIs. Checkmate.
purple_ferret 5y ago
Counterpoint: Cloudflare is a poorly run company that is well known for paying cheap. They don't have the clout to be a successful slavedriver like Amazon, so unless they shape up, they're not getting on the level of Microsoft/Amazon/Google.
FunnyLookinHat 5y ago
> So while AWS has 17 ways to run containers and 7 ways to do async message processing, all overlapping and reinforcing and supporting each other, Cloudflare will tend toward introducing singular primitives, stuff them in a box, and try to ship those boxes to as many places as will possibly take them. If they could install Cloudflare on your mobile phone, they would (this gets them dangerously close to being a real life Pied Piper). I think this statement resonates with me the most - it feels a lot like how I prefer to design systems (ahem, thanks Unix!): simple pieces or types, chained together into systems that are easy to understand, maintain, and scale. We're still only using Cloudflare's workers and it's integration with caching, but it's getting close to the point where I'd have enough primitives to ship some of the functionality of our system architecture to Cloudflare and gain a net-win for latency and simplicity.
- chrisweekly 5y ago
  Cool. When you chose CloudFlare, did you also look at Fly.io?
  - FunnyLookinHat 5y ago
    At the time we picked CloudFlare, Fly.io wasn't really on ours or anyone else's radar yet. I've been meaning to experiment with Fly.io and Fastly - thanks for the reminder!
- star-trek-fleet 5y ago
  > AWS has 17 ways to run containers and 7 ways to do async message processing, all overlapping and reinforcing and supporting each other, Cloudflare will tend toward introducing singular primitives, stuff them in a box, and try to ship those boxes to as many places as will possibly take them. Actually AWS also "tend toward introducing singular primitives, stuff them in a box, and try to ship those boxes to as many places as will possibly take them." It's just that AWS covers such a larger terrotery, that they appear fragmented. This is why I now almost don't read this type of macro-analysis articles. They themselves lack the overall birds-eye view, because they are usually produced by people with little concrete technical background. They often is very good at producing analogy, which is very intuitive, but very easily breakdown after moderate amount of details.
sharmin123 5y ago
How to Protect Your Privacy And Personal Data from Hackers?: https://www.hackerslist.co/how-to-protect-your-privacy-and-personal-data-from-hackersfrom-hackers-protect-personal-data/ https://www.hackerslist.co/how-to-protect-your-privacy-and-p...
gafferongames 5y ago
... and Google created an AI that beats them both.
- heybrendan 5y ago
  Not sure why you got down-voted. I for one appreciate your humor.
daxfohl 5y ago
I think much of the same could have been said for Heroku and its ecosystem. They tried a few critical services and plugins for everything else. It works great for some things, but not the enterprisey ones that are actually the profit cows. To win this game, surrounding territory is not enough. You have to go for the king.
dadrian 5y ago
Odd that this article suggests that Intel ignored a new technology until it was too late in the Apple case, when the article that they link to back that claim argues for the other style of disruption---low-end product eventually claws up market share and performance to compete with the high-end. The rest of the article seems reasonable, but IMHO and many other's opinions is that the Intel/Apple/ARM thing is classic disruption from the low end.
SubiculumCode 5y ago
Interesting article, but I have to disagree with the Chess - Go analogy. Pieces in chess do not have a fixed point value. "Knights are worth 3 points" is merely a heuristic that can be moderately useful in an initial assessment of a position...but anyone that plays chess knows that the NETWORK matters. A queen on the wrong side of the board is worth less than a pawn about to promote near the enemy's king; three coordinated pieces are worth more valuable than four isolated pieces.
- pwinnski 5y ago
  I'm not actually sure this makes the metaphor less applicable. Network and position matter for both, but the point values in Chess serve to describe the relative value of each piece in addition to that, while the lack of differentiation between pieces in Go means that even more attention must be paid to the network and positions. It is not that network or position don't matter in Chess, but that only network and position matter in Go.
lmilcin 5y ago
There isn't any particular reason why Amazon might not decide one day to copy Cloudflare as one of their services. And then all clients of Cloudflare that are also AWS clients will switch to AWS for the same service, same cost, but one less headache. On the other hand, Cloudflare is unable to copy AWS business model. So, revised title: "AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go on a board and time borrowed from Amazon"
- maxk42 5y ago
  There is one: Cloudflare isn't profitable. Cloudflare is still in growth mode: They're losing money hand-over-fist. AWS, on the other hand, is a money-printing machine. Personally, I don't trust Cloudflare until they achieve profitability. They're going to have to raise their rates one day, and alienate the majority of their customers.
  - mayli 5y ago
    Probably not really losing money, depends on the cost of bandwidth. Since CF has purchased tons of pipes, it doesn't cost them that much to feed slightly more traffic into it.
    - maxk42 5y ago
      I'm not really worried about the cost of traffic. According to their latest 10-Q [0] they earned 152 million and spent 187 million for a net loss of 35 million. About 76 million of that (40.6%) went to sales, so they're certainly not spending it on the pipes. But despite a large increase in sales spending they're less profitable than they were during the same period a year earlier. They're losing $1.23 for every dollar they earn. [0] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000147733321000036/cloud-20210630.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/0001...
- paxys 5y ago
  AWS doesn't need to copy Cloudflare. It already has literally everything Cloudflare does in their catalog already. In spite of this Cloudflare is still attracting customers at premium prices.
swyx 5y ago
hey author here! thanks for posting this, i guess my original title wasn't HNbait enough huh :) happy to take any questions, and yes acknowledged that I dont follow pro chess at all, keeping it in there as a reverse shibboleth and a reminder that i'm just a rando guy on the internet who can be wrong
- agomez314 5y ago
  You brought many fascinating ideas to the table with this article. As someone who's seeing this for the first time, and adjusting to the paradigm shift you laid out, I'm curious to know what was the context which led you to write this article. What sort of ideas, resources and events helped you connect the dots and express CloudFlare's plan in this way?
  - swyx 5y ago
    thanks! I worked at Netlify and AWS before my current job at Temporal, so: - I've spent quite some time thinking about how "new clouds" compete with Amazon - I've seen Netlify argue (with mixed results) that its users should not put Cloudflare in front of Netlify - I've had casual chats with Rita and James (mentioned in the article) that got me really thinking about what their strategy is. I've had "eating the cloud from outside in" since the start of the year - the Go analogy only came that weekend when I finally sat down to write this thing and R2 was just freshly out. - I've listened closely to all of Ben Thompson's stuff
sbazerque 5y ago
I'm thinking there's an interesting parallel between our browser-based p2p project [1] and cloudflare workers / DurableObjects. Instead of DurableObjects, we got HashedObjects [2], and instead of workers running on an edge network somewhere, we got in-browser p2p nodes running a browser-to-browser mesh network. In general, what they do with infra, we do with cryptography & datatypes. [1] Hyper Hyper Space: https://www.hyperhyperspace.org https://www.hyperhyperspace.org [2] HashedObject: https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-core/blob/master/src/data/model/HashedObject.ts https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-core/blob...
netcan 5y ago
The differences between web2 disruption and web3 disruption strategy games is like the difference between robin hood and bladerunner. Google went public @ $20bn and the papers were full of stories about Googlers getting filthy rich. Now bloggers casually comment on scrappy $10bn incumbents and the possibility of integrating a literal currency mint. web 4 is gonna be a bastard. I wish douglas adams was still around to explain this all to us.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
TomSwirly 5y ago
> In Chess, you win when you take the King, which in effect has infinite point value, and it is relatively uncommon to come to a draw. Over half of chess games end in a draw, it's the most common outcome!
jollybean 5y ago
They are not in the same business. Most of AWS is Big Corps putting their IT stuff onto EC2s. We're seeing the cloud grow and naturally evolve into different pieces.
ryanisnan 5y ago
On the whole analogy of R2 circling S3 as a go metaphor - what happens if AWS were to simply nix egress costs? I wish Cloudflare all the success, but I don't know if they have a substantive moat here.
- pas 5y ago
  Then everyone who had to run in AWS now has the option to think about running outside. Which establishes a new market sector and puts enormous (?) downward pressure on the price of some internal services. Cloudflare is not worried about this, they want that, because it would open market access to a lot of juicy potential clients, who are already cloud ready but AWS locked in. Plus they have this shot, they try to make this count, to get traction. If AWS moves now it'll be attributed to them. At that point they win by default. (At least that's the theory :))
  - Rapzid 5y ago
    Do a lot of people "run" on S3? I'm guess that sort of thin lock-in is perhaps a tiny portion of S3 and AWSs utility billing revenue? Even so, dropping egress fees if they see substantial migration could completely change the calculus on the switching costs for users.
    - pas 5y ago
      Every data processing workload is basically S3 based. Hadoop in the cloud is nothing more than X on HDFS on S3. But egress fees apply for everything, not just S3. Currently cross-cloud or multi-cloud orchestration and/or scheduling makes no sense, because egress fees just make it uneconomical (in most cases). The lower the fee gets the better the numbers will look like for mixing and marching services from providers.
Rapzid 5y ago
I'm really, really confused about all the discussion of R2 as if it were completely fungible with S3. Certainly for certain use cases it could be an alternative. Even as an adjunct to existing S3 use. However without IAM integration, bucket events, and etc. there is a huge set of use cases where it wouldn't even be a blip on peoples radar. Chess vs Go? Couldn't AWS just lower their prices for egress with low to medium(medium for AWS) effort? What am I missing here?
- pierofoti 5y ago
  The missing IAM functionality is also what is preventing myself moving some services to R2. CloudFlare Workers are not 1:1 with AWS Lambda either, yet they have seen significant improvements, which likely continue to accommodate for more use cases. I suspect R2 will see similar improvements. AWS having high egress fees is the moat around their business. If AWS respond by lowering egress costs then they are opening the fort.
lowbloodsugar 5y ago
Well, they are competing for same market, so whatever game it is, it's the same game. Perhaps it's Fluxx [1], a game where you can change the rules. Perhaps, from the authors perspective it is fight to the death, and AWS is infantry lines against Cloudflare guerrilla warfare. But isn't it simply that Cloudflare is following the disruptors handbook? And therefore isn't AWS most likely fully aware of what Cloudflare is up to and what the avenues (revenues) for attack are, rather than bumbling around playing the wrong game? [1] https://www.looneylabs.com/games/fluxx https://www.looneylabs.com/games/fluxx
polote 5y ago
Cloudflare is a CDN. Nobody is going to use them to store their data even if they are cheaper. If customers cared about price they are already using B2 and B2 is still cheaper than R2. Cloudflare is not eating anyone. They are just trying to expand their TAM. Cloudflare has always been very good at engineering marketing, and R2 is another masterclass but it will never eat S3
- maxgashkov 5y ago
  Nobody will store their data _now_. If in 2-3-5 yrs it's proven to be both durable & highly available (I'm looking at your maintenance windows, B2) I don't see a lot of reasons not to move away from S3 as this should be plug & play at this point. There will be edge cases for highly regulated businesses of course, but for an average startup why not?
- d23 5y ago
  > Cloudflare is a CDN. Everyone would readily consider using them to store their data since they're cheaper. Customers that care about price may have cheaper options, but Cloudflare has excellent engineering marketing. > Cloudflare will be eating everyone. They are trying to expand their TAM, and R2 is a masterclass. Figured I'd throw another overconfident unsubstantiated claim into the mix. I was even able to use the same exact points to argue the opposite position.
moonraker 5y ago
I think the argument for Cloudflare successfully "disrupting" AWS is wrong. I'd imagine that Cloudflare's master plan isn't to render Big Cloud obsolete (in a Christiansen/MBA case study sense) . They want to become the edge compute equivalent of Big Cloud (AWS/MSFT/GCP). They've already invested in the physical prescence to do so (similar to the massive fixed cost that it takes to build hyperscale data centers around the world), in a manner that's most valuable to their customers (low latency compute, storage and egress). This isn't disruption: it's new market creation. It just won't be obvious that's the case for another 10-15 years...

797 points by pimterry 5y ago

Just wanted to point out that you can in fact install Cloudflare on your mobile phone: https://blog.cloudflare.com/1111-warp-better-vpn/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/1111-warp-better-vpn/

lucasverra 5y ago
Mmm too much wording for a big-tech overlord free product. I've used nextdns.io as a "free & limited" and now paying customer. Get rid of trackers and ads by dns, I get to give them 20usd/year, so I know that their business model should not be to resell my data. There is an affiliate link to give if you are interested. iOS app and great UI in the web.
- tyingq 5y ago
  The lead-in is about the 1.1.1.1 dns product, but the bulk of the article is about the VPN/accelerator, Warp.
swyx 5y ago
dear god. of course they have an app. will update! thanks michael :)

agomez314 5y ago

Can someone share a link that describes Clay Christensen's thought or analysis on his management style? Watching Prince explain the Innovator's Dilemma piqued my interest

mattferderer 5y ago
He has written for Harvard Business Review for decades - https://hbr.org/search?N=516164&Ns=publication_date%7C1&Ntt=clayton+m.+christensen#browse-reports-filter https://hbr.org/search?N=516164&Ns=publication_date%7C1&Ntt=... I believe some reviewers of his book say that the book is his HBR writings organized into a book. In case you're not aware there is the actual book Clay wrote as well - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

rsmets 5y ago

I consider Clouflare to be the least reliable cloud service provider out there. So many CDN and DNS related outages thanks to poor engineering release practices. Considering those are their bread and butter services I wouldn't ever rely on any of their other services.

qaq 5y ago
Do they have more outages than AWS or GCP?
ehPReth 5y ago
Do they?
gfosco 5y ago
Enterprise CloudFlare customer here, can't remember a single disruption or outage in the last year.
- AtNightWeCode 5y ago
  It is simply incorrect. We have most of our customers on Cloudflare and the larger customers are on enterprise deals. My only criticism to Cloudflare is simply that it is just not as stellar as some of the more expensive alternatives. It is not a high end service but still the right choice for a lot of sites.
judge2020 5y ago
When it happens, it breaks a lot of the internet, but "so many" is stretching it - the entire CF network has only gone down a couple of times in the time I've known about them (~6 years).
- hunterb123 5y ago
  They went down at least 4 times last year. Always noticeable as Discord will go down.
  - 5y ago

jgrahamc 5y ago

Amusingly, I really never enjoyed playing chess, but have always enjoyed Go.

azemetre 5y ago
You should look up a game called Hive. I like to think of it as a "modern" chess. Games typically last 10-30 minutes and has just as much complexity and strategy (in my opinion) as chess.

tromp 5y ago

Minor quibbles about game remarks: Contrary to what the article claims, draws in chess are very common (on the other hand, they're exceedingly rare in Go, and often impossible due to fractional komi). Sente in Go does correspond to having the initiative, but a move that compels a player into a particular follow-up move should be called a "kikashi" (forcing move).

elzbardico 5y ago
I'd even say that when playing black against someone of roughly the same or higher level than you, a draw is your goal.
- jacobsenscott 5y ago
  White's advantage is so small - this is only true at the very highest levels of play.
raziel2p 5y ago
Draws are extremely common in high level play, and statistics don't seem to exist for all levels of play, but I'm willing to guess that it's fairly uncommon across all games of rating 1600 or higher.
- danielbarla 5y ago
  I agree that publicly available large datasets / statistics become fairly rare below the 1600, above that level they are fairly common. But anecdotally, I once messed around with a bunch of large datasets for the purpose of comparing high-level play to lower ones, and the statistics weren't spectacularly different. Yes, the results are essentially far more random the lower you go (especially below 1800, where play is essentially a lot less accurate), but draws are still fairly common at the 1600 level. If memory serves, top-level games had around two-thirds end in a draw, while at the 1600 level, it was basically down to one third. Not what I would call uncommon, though certainly no longer the dominant result.
- kmm 5y ago

alisonkisk 5y ago

The chess/go analogy is so weak it's misleading. The claim is that Amazon competes on a per-service basis, while CloudFlare is competing by flanking with related services. It doesn't really make sense.

jpgvm 5y ago

Sandstorm lives on. :) s/grains/durable-objects/ etc but hey, it's still all here. Would love to get a blog post or talk on the journey if you are lurking kenton.

ryukafalz 5y ago
Yeah, though durable objects are a great idea I do wish they weren't proprietary. I hope they get enough traction to spur the development of a self-hostable FOSS competitor though. (Ideally one that's interoperable with it!)
- judge2020 5y ago
  If it helps, the concept is super-simple and reimplementing such a service won't be hard if anyone tries to make it interoperable with Workers. Miniflare (a dev environment for Workers) implements it in just over 200 loc[0], with the only backend beint Workers KV for data storage (<500 loc if you count that). 0: https://github.com/cloudflare/miniflare/blob/master/src/modules/do.ts https://github.com/cloudflare/miniflare/blob/master/src/modu...
nextaccountic 5y ago
But, does Cloudflare gives back control to the user? (like Sandstorm does) I think the spiritual successor of Sandstorm is Tim Berners-Lee's Solid https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/ that was recently cited in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903601 But, while Sandstorm is all about compartmentalizing access to data in a single server, having the document (grain) as its unit, Solid does this with multiple servers (called pods)
- jpgvm 5y ago
  Fair. Sandstorms technical ideas are well represented in Cloudflares product lineup now but not yet it's philosophy. Maybe some of that will change some day. I wasn't aware of Solid, going to check it out!
- 5y ago

asim 5y ago

I'm a huge cloudflare fan. Massive advocate for them but when I do see this talk of them as a new kind of cloud platform I cringe a little. Are we going to under go the same lock-in like experience we've had over the years by using very bespoke closed sourced systems like workers and durable objects. It's one thing to buy into something that does have wide portability like a postgres but much harder to buy into the platforms that aren't open source.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
Should’ve sounded the alarm 15 years ago when S3 was invented.
- asim 5y ago
  So the interesting thing, back then I think we were willing because of the nascent state of cloud services. We hadn't fully bought into any of this because most were still just buying hardware or renting servers and building their own software. S3 and EC2 were pretty pivotal in the move to this lock-in from a pure infrastructure perspective. Luckily s3 equivalent apis exist on every cloud provider now, its a staple cloud service but I think in 2021 as more things appear, they should be open source first. The open source companies start with that, I think cloud companies should actually open source the tech too.
dgb23 5y ago
They're smart about this. It's infrastructure lock-in but not at the API/application level, as they are trying to stay as close to "just JavaScript with browser API semantics" as possible. Deno is a project that does this too. If you know service workers and web workers you know Cloudflare Workers. If you know JS OO you know Durable Objects (to a degree). Think about it, the huge influx of web developers that have been growing up on just using JS. Look at their docs too. It's all very accessible, modern, low friction stuff all while they are selling us their infrastructure. And they communicate in a technical, programmer friendly way as opposed to the business/marketing jargon that we are used to by some of the others.
- 5y ago

Joe8Bit 5y ago

Good article, thanks for submiting! The challenge for AWS is one lots of incumbents have experienced: they created a market and it's economics and now they're being attacked by the next generation of market entrants who've structured their businesses to _specifically_ attack those economics. What's interesting is that challenge can be a really big problem for incumbents, as those economics can form a core (very rigid) part of their operating model; it can make it VERY hard to address without fundamental (read: risky) change to a business. There aren't many examples of incumbent businesses doing it successfully, as it needs a kind of 'self-inflicted disruption' that's very hard to do in large organisations where politics and empire building can make it difficult. If someone could do Managed NAT Gateway next I'd appreciate it!

jgrahamc 5y ago
they created a market and it's economics and now they're being attacked by the next generation of market entrants who've structured their businesses to _specifically_ attack those economics https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244 https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan...
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  Did you purposely link to it on Amazon? :)
- Joe8Bit 5y ago
  Hah, thanks! My comment was fairly blatantly stealing from the book! It's so interesting from an incumbents internal POV (I saw it a few times during my time at McKinsey) as changing an organisations economics is often the unstoppable force that meets the immovable object of internal politics. There's a really interesting ongoing example of this in the the UK as 'attacker' banks (e.g. Monzo, Starling) challenge the economics of incumbents. It's not quite the same, as these attackers are removing back-end cost (e.g. branch networks) from an already 'free' product (e.g. retail banking) but it's meant that big banks are looking at their balance sheets and seeing a set of gaping money pits that will require fundamental change in their operating models to be able to get rid of/compete with.

pohl 5y ago

This reads as though the entire chess vs go conceit was meant only to bait eyes into making it all the way down to the last paragraph, which jumps the shark by dignifying Web3 nonsense.

losvedir 5y ago

I think the Go philosophy is probably healthier for an economy overall. I can't say whether that's really what's going on here with Cloudflare specifically, but it's an interesting way of framing the discussion. In particular, the thing that catches my eye is in the "Territory" section of the post, and the idea that in Go it's not "winner take all". A good Go player won't necessarily beat a less good one by a lot, but will consistently take more territory by the end. Or, as one of my Go strategy books put it: think about a kid cutting a brownie in half to share - they want to give themselves a bit more, but if you're too greedy and try to take a large fraction of it, mom won't let you and you'll end up losing out. I like the idea that in the economy, good ideas and good companies win more often, in that they get the most marketshare, but not necessarily by a lot.

steve76 5y ago
Chess player. Go. What are you? A child? Real world is not a game. Someone steps to you, drop them, drop them fast and drop them hard enough to bury them. What we lack is clarity, exactly where we are and who we are dealing with. Russian businessmen are known to launch a wave of terror in the face of competition, car bombings that blow up post offices and police stations. The Chinese just poisoned the world with a bioweapon over soybean tariffs. My advice to Amazon would be next space launch, don't launch one, launch a thousand. Build a monster of a launch pad on the moon. Anyone bothers you, crash asteroids on them and kill their entire country.
InvaderFizz 5y ago
> think about a kid cutting a brownie in half to share - they want to give themselves a bit more, but if you're too greedy and try to take a large fraction of it, mom won't let you and you'll end up losing out. We take a slightly different approach in my house. The person that divides the treat, gets last pick. It's very effective at getting the closest to equal distribution possible. The only time it falls apart is when I'm not particularly worried, so I haphazardly break the cookie in half and end up with 1/4 for myself.

igtztorrero 5y ago

"You can check-out any time you like ... but you can never leave! " That's why I choose Digital

_8j50 5y ago

How does their s3 replacement fare against backblaze b2?

prirun 5y ago
(Author of Hashbackup) B2 pricing is 0.5 cents/GB/mo, R2 is 1.5 cents/GB/mo. B2 egress is 1 cents/GB/mo with 1GB/day free, R2 is free. If your cloud storage is for backups, B2 is likely to be less expensive because backups are rarely downloaded and their 1GB/day of free egress is enough to do backup maintenance to optimize storage. Cloudflare's CDN can proxy a B2 bucket to get free egress and maybe faster downloads (haven't needed it myself): https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using-Backblaze-B2-with-the-Cloudflare-CDN https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using... I'm a big fan of B2 because: - they have low pricing - they have simple pricing - they don't use gimmicks: minimum storage time, minimum file size, minimum payment per month, etc. HashBackup was one of the first B2 integrations and I've never had problems with it.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  Do remember that Cloudlfare's CDN is not meant to serve non-webpage content. They outline it in their ToS; section 2.8 here: https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ It is unlikely that this same restriction would apply to R2.
  - badinfo 5y ago
    Their CEO was on here the other day and said it doesn't apply to R2 or Workers, and that they needed to update their TOS: > (eastdakota) That limitation doesn’t apply to the R2 service or Workers generally. We’ll update and clarify our ToS. Thanks for flagging! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28683255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28683255
- _8j50 5y ago
  Thank you. I was going to explore usage if R2 or B2 for elasticsearch "cold-index" storage. R2 seems more ideal for better egress.

liveoneggs 5y ago

akamai has had Netstorage ~forever so I wish I understood why this cloudflare product is such big news. AWS is just so much more

cryptonym 5y ago
Not the first feature to fall in that category. I do not think it's that big for the industry overall. Cloudflare is better at PR / more visible than Akamai. It might be interesting for markets where Akamai is not really competing (low budget?). S3 compatible API also is a plus.
- liveoneggs 5y ago
  yeah I also seem to remember being able to deploy a JAR file directly to akamai in the early 2000's as well, although we never tried it for production
pqdbr 5y ago
I could answer your question a thousand different ways but, to be concise, go to akamai.com and find me the pricing of any service they sell.
- opinion-is-bad 5y ago
  Pretty nice for Cloudflare that their closest competitor makes very little effort to gain customers, and actively avoids the hobbyist set which is key for mindshare.
notyourday 5y ago
Akamai netstorage was/is expensive, requires a contract and interacting with inept, overpaid and rather useless sales people and sales engineering that insist on coming to your office to yap about their awesomeness a-la IBM, and is a part of CDN which is also expensive and also requires a contract with more sales people and sales engineers that insist on coming to your offices to yap about their awesomeness. I cannot wait until someone finally puts Akamai out of its misery -- they stopped being an innovative company in 2000s.

noasaservice 5y ago

A different problem is that, at least with federal agencies, Cloudflare has a BAD name. Like unbelievably bad. They do have a FedRAMP offering as of this year.. But I've been on calls with agencies. Dept heads, executive yuck-de-yucks. And we've gotten, "Are you using Cloudflare?" We don't, and say so. Resoundingly, we get "GOOD" We have no clue what the story and history is there. It's bad for sure. And nobody will answer why. On the commercial end, this makes sense. But damn, egress from the majors suck. But that's roach motel computing...

ren_engineer 5y ago
probably the fact Cloudflare doesn't just shut down sites at the governments request. I'd also imagine a good chunk of them have been wined and dined by Oracle, Google, Microsoft, and AWS lobbyists to think that Cloudflare is bad. I doubt non-technical federal agency heads are double checking what they are being told
rocqua 5y ago
I know there was a lot of pressure on Cloudflare to drop hosting for 8chan. And it took a long time for Cloudflare to budge. In general, I could imagine there being pressure on those grounds against using Cloudflare.
RNCTX 5y ago
I'd wager that dept heads and executive yuck-de-yucks by and large only know what they heard from other dept heads and executive yuck-de-yucks, which is that Cloudflare didn't buy into the censorship-by-boardroom-committee plans of the two American political parties over the past few years.
wp381640 5y ago
Is see this as a positive for Cloudflare
snowwrestler 5y ago
Cloudflare’s priority is growth. They intentionally take on customer risk and technical risk to try to maximize growth. As a result they incline toward hosting whoever wants to use them, and moving fast and breaking things. Neither of these align with typical federal govt approach to IT infrastructure, which emphasizes reliability and avoiding known risk. It’s just a big personality mismatch, and there’s no reason for either to resolve it. Cloudflare doesn’t need the feds, and the feds don’t need Cloudflare, at least not commercially.

sudhirj 5y ago

The article makes no mention of the Cloudflare's enterprise networking tools, and its VPN. Cloudflare is basically in a position to run the internet for most people to buy into it - I have their VPN on my phone and computer, which gets my fast access inside their network. By fronting so many of the world's websites, a lot (maybe a majority?) of my traffic actually flows inside Cloudflare. Now with Workers, R2, Durable Objects, the server side can move to Cloudflare too. If it makes sense to move servers on the network where the clients are, then this is where they should go.

breakingcups 5y ago
That just makes it feel like a proprietary layer on top of the internet. Or, to draw it further into the scale you mention, a single-party replacement for the internet. Neither of these things sound like a long-term win.
- sudhirj 5y ago
  No, they're both very short term wins for companies, which means they might happen anyway. Cloudflare has demonstrated ethical behaviour so far, but that's not enough to trust a single part with the internet. Short of the new age web3 stuff, though, not sure what else is a suitable alternative. Competitors to Cloudflare aren't as common because of their gigantic moat — imagine building an org that builds out to hundreds of cities around the world and partners with thousands of network companies.
  - breakingcups 5y ago
    Definitions of ethical may differ. Shielding far-right sites, cesspits like Kiwi Farms which make it their stated goal to drive people they don't like to suicide, criminals like DDOS vendors, credit card fraud forums, etc. all under the guise of being a "neutral passthrough layer third party" feels incredibly disingenuous to me. The aforementioned people are Cloudflare's customers and Cloudflare hosts their content (yes, sometimes with a short ttl, but the public IP address still terminates at their web servers). They can not be afforded the same leeway that actual internet exchanges are when routing traffic to bad actors. So no. They may have demonstrated business-friendly behaviour. But ethical? No.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dflock 5y ago

Cloudflare are very smart - and they have Second Mover Advantage.

fmajid 5y ago

No, AWS is playing Monopoly.

rossdavidh 5y ago
If that's what they're playing, they're doing a mediocre job of it. They should be forcing Microsoft and Google to rent their cloud services, then using high rents there to force them to sell their own cloud services to Amazon. Not likely to work out for them there. But, to your point, I'm sure they would if they knew how.
- judge2020 5y ago
  I'm sure they all have some amount of critical backups on the other cloud providers' services.
discodave 5y ago
This is actually a great way to think about it for a number of reasons. 1. Look up what James Hamilton (AWS Distinguished Engineer) has been saying for years about commodity economics disrupting things. It's about the money, stupid. 2. The way AWS has been building out their ecosystem is following a lot of the previous monopolists (Microsoft) playbook. Get other companies to be 'partners' in your ecosystem so they depend on your platform? Check. Training and certification so technologists are tied to your platform? Check, and so on. 3. Amazon and AWS are usually never playing the game people think they are. For example, all the years that people questioned Amazons profits, they were doing their best to hide profits with massive R&D & other investments. In the case of CloudFlare attacking AWS network/bandwidth pricing, it's worth pointing out that >60% of AWS revenue comes from EC2!!!! S3, and CloudFront is (relatively) small fries.

lewisjoe 5y ago

As much as I like to have something else leading this market other than AWS (I hate them for several reasons, but insensitive billing plans, cockpit like interface and lock-in services are the top ones), I'd also hate to see Cloudflare become another AWS. Are there any tech disruption that will make computing resources affordable for solopreneurs/startups as they once used to be. For the past decade I've seen a very slow gradual decrease in the affordability of cloud computing cost. I trust WASM and WASI will have a huge effect in democratizing the market but I'm not sure yet.

mooreds 5y ago
> I've seen a very slow gradual decrease in the affordability of cloud computing cost. What do you mean by "cloud computing cost"? Digital Ocean will sell you a VPS for $5/month with 1TB bandwidth included. There are tons of hosting providers that offer something similar. These prices don't seem higher than they were 10 years ago. What am I missing?
- lewisjoe 5y ago
  Yes but try running a couple of servers with a decent amount of ram say 4GB and we’d notice how the cost goes exponential. Point being running a couple of servers with a decent ram and a decent amount of storage shouldn’t cost 50$. It should be say, 7$. I know the ask is too much. Just want to see if there’d be any fundamental tech breakthrough to make something like this happen.
  - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    A Linode VPS with 4GB RAM costs $20/month, 4 times more then the 1GB instance. Dedicated VM is $30/month for 4GB, but that's the smallest so can't compare there. But that's only a little bit more than the shared vps, so I'd consider it pretty reasonable. A few years ago I couldn't find a $5/month option. The cheapest Linode was $10/month. EDIT checked Wayback Machine...10 years ago, a 512MB RAM Linode cost $19.95/month.
  - wongarsu 5y ago

Alex3917 5y ago

> Meanwhile, when people think of "Tier 1" AWS services, its Cloudflare equivalent, Amazon CloudFront, rarely gets any love, and the official AWS Twitter account hasn't tweeted about it in almost a year. In the last couple years, CloudFront has gone from not really working to actually working very well. Invalidations are now instant, both from the command line and the CLI. You used to be unable to customize response headers, but now you can do that fairly easily. Maybe they're not publicly talking about it, but they've actually gone and fixed all the major problems.

bsedlm 5y ago

When thinking about how China came to dominate all manufacturing, it makes me wonder if China was playing Go and rest of the west was playing chess

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Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
I always imagined it was because China could pay their employees scraps and didn't care about workplace safety. No idea if that's accurate or not, though.
- opinion-is-bad 5y ago
  It’s a bit of both. Lots of countries have low wages and lax safety protocols, but they haven’t been able to hit double digit gdp growth for decades because of that alone.
opinion-is-bad 5y ago
The book “On China” by Henry Kissinger makes almost that exact argument. Whatever your opinion on Kissinger, he opened relations with China and definitely has an interest viewpoint.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

Great writup and I love the Go vs. Chess metaphor (I am an avid Chess and Go player, including taking lessons from a South Korean Go Master). I feel a little guilty using so many free Cloudflare products, while paying them only a small amount of money for occasional upgrades. If I were building a serverless based startup, I would seriously consider them over GCP or AWS.

antifa 5y ago
> The big 3 clouds are playing Chess, but Cloudflare is playing Go. I think most lay people don't know the nuances between chess and go and would presume that chess is the more advanced game based on superficial first impressions. Probably not a good metaphor because I don't know the author's opinion on the games and most people will probably see the title and interpret it in opposite ways. Using "3D chess" instead would have been a more clear metaphor.

herostratus101 5y ago

"In Chess, you win when you take the King, which in effect has infinite point value, and it is relatively uncommon to come to a draw." Great article, but this guy clearly does not follow competitive chess. The vast majority of games end in a draw.

minkzilla 5y ago
You also don't "take" the king. The game ends one turn before you would be able to take it.

djbusby 5y ago

What blows my mind is that folk put Cloudflare in front of their AWS stack. Does one really need both?

judge2020 5y ago
This is often a business decision. Cloudflare's bandwidth is free, and with smart tiered caching my operation serves 6TB a month while only paying out 125gb of AWS egress (with extremely hot files).
- infinitone 5y ago
  Wait can you please elaborate more? I have a site that gets a ton of traffic and my biggest bill is AWS cloudfront bandwidth... how can i reduce this using cloudflare?
  - oblio 5y ago
    Switch out Cloudfront for Cloudflare. Or put it in front of it, if that's what floats your boat.
AtNightWeCode 5y ago
Well, the currently most used paradigm for building web is that you see the edge servers as your classic web servers and then see the cloud as a service layer. Good for security and scaling. Maybe you can achieve the same thing within AWS.

gwbas1c 5y ago

[Meta] I love the custom scrollbar. Works seamlessly, and the chunky look is cool.

yobert 5y ago
It is cute. Wish it worked in firefox though!
- mayli 5y ago
  Yeah, I could borrow that in my next website.

ameminator 5y ago

This guy definitely plays go - although I hope that screenshot from KGS was someone else's game.

Kalanos 5y ago

Amazon prides itself on the "race to zero cost" as a way to beat competitors. AWS will release a service with feature-parity at the same price and customers will default to that. so cloudflare is learning to play checkers poorly.

Kalanos 5y ago
Additionally, that AWS service will work with cloudtrail, cloudwatch, IAM, networking, and will get integrated into default APIs. Checkmate.

purple_ferret 5y ago

Counterpoint: Cloudflare is a poorly run company that is well known for paying cheap. They don't have the clout to be a successful slavedriver like Amazon, so unless they shape up, they're not getting on the level of Microsoft/Amazon/Google.

FunnyLookinHat 5y ago

> So while AWS has 17 ways to run containers and 7 ways to do async message processing, all overlapping and reinforcing and supporting each other, Cloudflare will tend toward introducing singular primitives, stuff them in a box, and try to ship those boxes to as many places as will possibly take them. If they could install Cloudflare on your mobile phone, they would (this gets them dangerously close to being a real life Pied Piper). I think this statement resonates with me the most - it feels a lot like how I prefer to design systems (ahem, thanks Unix!): simple pieces or types, chained together into systems that are easy to understand, maintain, and scale. We're still only using Cloudflare's workers and it's integration with caching, but it's getting close to the point where I'd have enough primitives to ship some of the functionality of our system architecture to Cloudflare and gain a net-win for latency and simplicity.

chrisweekly 5y ago
Cool. When you chose CloudFlare, did you also look at Fly.io?
- FunnyLookinHat 5y ago
  At the time we picked CloudFlare, Fly.io wasn't really on ours or anyone else's radar yet. I've been meaning to experiment with Fly.io and Fastly - thanks for the reminder!
star-trek-fleet 5y ago
> AWS has 17 ways to run containers and 7 ways to do async message processing, all overlapping and reinforcing and supporting each other, Cloudflare will tend toward introducing singular primitives, stuff them in a box, and try to ship those boxes to as many places as will possibly take them. Actually AWS also "tend toward introducing singular primitives, stuff them in a box, and try to ship those boxes to as many places as will possibly take them." It's just that AWS covers such a larger terrotery, that they appear fragmented. This is why I now almost don't read this type of macro-analysis articles. They themselves lack the overall birds-eye view, because they are usually produced by people with little concrete technical background. They often is very good at producing analogy, which is very intuitive, but very easily breakdown after moderate amount of details.

sharmin123 5y ago

How to Protect Your Privacy And Personal Data from Hackers?: https://www.hackerslist.co/how-to-protect-your-privacy-and-personal-data-from-hackersfrom-hackers-protect-personal-data/ https://www.hackerslist.co/how-to-protect-your-privacy-and-p...

gafferongames 5y ago

... and Google created an AI that beats them both.

heybrendan 5y ago
Not sure why you got down-voted. I for one appreciate your humor.

daxfohl 5y ago

I think much of the same could have been said for Heroku and its ecosystem. They tried a few critical services and plugins for everything else. It works great for some things, but not the enterprisey ones that are actually the profit cows. To win this game, surrounding territory is not enough. You have to go for the king.

dadrian 5y ago

Odd that this article suggests that Intel ignored a new technology until it was too late in the Apple case, when the article that they link to back that claim argues for the other style of disruption---low-end product eventually claws up market share and performance to compete with the high-end. The rest of the article seems reasonable, but IMHO and many other's opinions is that the Intel/Apple/ARM thing is classic disruption from the low end.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

Interesting article, but I have to disagree with the Chess - Go analogy. Pieces in chess do not have a fixed point value. "Knights are worth 3 points" is merely a heuristic that can be moderately useful in an initial assessment of a position...but anyone that plays chess knows that the NETWORK matters. A queen on the wrong side of the board is worth less than a pawn about to promote near the enemy's king; three coordinated pieces are worth more valuable than four isolated pieces.

pwinnski 5y ago
I'm not actually sure this makes the metaphor less applicable. Network and position matter for both, but the point values in Chess serve to describe the relative value of each piece in addition to that, while the lack of differentiation between pieces in Go means that even more attention must be paid to the network and positions. It is not that network or position don't matter in Chess, but that only network and position matter in Go.

lmilcin 5y ago

There isn't any particular reason why Amazon might not decide one day to copy Cloudflare as one of their services. And then all clients of Cloudflare that are also AWS clients will switch to AWS for the same service, same cost, but one less headache. On the other hand, Cloudflare is unable to copy AWS business model. So, revised title: "AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go on a board and time borrowed from Amazon"

maxk42 5y ago
There is one: Cloudflare isn't profitable. Cloudflare is still in growth mode: They're losing money hand-over-fist. AWS, on the other hand, is a money-printing machine. Personally, I don't trust Cloudflare until they achieve profitability. They're going to have to raise their rates one day, and alienate the majority of their customers.
- mayli 5y ago
  Probably not really losing money, depends on the cost of bandwidth. Since CF has purchased tons of pipes, it doesn't cost them that much to feed slightly more traffic into it.
  - maxk42 5y ago
    I'm not really worried about the cost of traffic. According to their latest 10-Q [0] they earned 152 million and spent 187 million for a net loss of 35 million. About 76 million of that (40.6%) went to sales, so they're certainly not spending it on the pipes. But despite a large increase in sales spending they're less profitable than they were during the same period a year earlier. They're losing $1.23 for every dollar they earn. [0] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000147733321000036/cloud-20210630.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/0001...
paxys 5y ago
AWS doesn't need to copy Cloudflare. It already has literally everything Cloudflare does in their catalog already. In spite of this Cloudflare is still attracting customers at premium prices.

swyx 5y ago

hey author here! thanks for posting this, i guess my original title wasn't HNbait enough huh :) happy to take any questions, and yes acknowledged that I dont follow pro chess at all, keeping it in there as a reverse shibboleth and a reminder that i'm just a rando guy on the internet who can be wrong

agomez314 5y ago
You brought many fascinating ideas to the table with this article. As someone who's seeing this for the first time, and adjusting to the paradigm shift you laid out, I'm curious to know what was the context which led you to write this article. What sort of ideas, resources and events helped you connect the dots and express CloudFlare's plan in this way?
- swyx 5y ago
  thanks! I worked at Netlify and AWS before my current job at Temporal, so: - I've spent quite some time thinking about how "new clouds" compete with Amazon - I've seen Netlify argue (with mixed results) that its users should not put Cloudflare in front of Netlify - I've had casual chats with Rita and James (mentioned in the article) that got me really thinking about what their strategy is. I've had "eating the cloud from outside in" since the start of the year - the Go analogy only came that weekend when I finally sat down to write this thing and R2 was just freshly out. - I've listened closely to all of Ben Thompson's stuff

sbazerque 5y ago

I'm thinking there's an interesting parallel between our browser-based p2p project [1] and cloudflare workers / DurableObjects. Instead of DurableObjects, we got HashedObjects [2], and instead of workers running on an edge network somewhere, we got in-browser p2p nodes running a browser-to-browser mesh network. In general, what they do with infra, we do with cryptography & datatypes. [1] Hyper Hyper Space: https://www.hyperhyperspace.org https://www.hyperhyperspace.org [2] HashedObject: https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-core/blob/master/src/data/model/HashedObject.ts https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-core/blob...

netcan 5y ago

The differences between web2 disruption and web3 disruption strategy games is like the difference between robin hood and bladerunner. Google went public @ $20bn and the papers were full of stories about Googlers getting filthy rich. Now bloggers casually comment on scrappy $10bn incumbents and the possibility of integrating a literal currency mint. web 4 is gonna be a bastard. I wish douglas adams was still around to explain this all to us.

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TomSwirly 5y ago

> In Chess, you win when you take the King, which in effect has infinite point value, and it is relatively uncommon to come to a draw. Over half of chess games end in a draw, it's the most common outcome!

jollybean 5y ago

They are not in the same business. Most of AWS is Big Corps putting their IT stuff onto EC2s. We're seeing the cloud grow and naturally evolve into different pieces.

ryanisnan 5y ago

On the whole analogy of R2 circling S3 as a go metaphor - what happens if AWS were to simply nix egress costs? I wish Cloudflare all the success, but I don't know if they have a substantive moat here.

pas 5y ago
Then everyone who had to run in AWS now has the option to think about running outside. Which establishes a new market sector and puts enormous (?) downward pressure on the price of some internal services. Cloudflare is not worried about this, they want that, because it would open market access to a lot of juicy potential clients, who are already cloud ready but AWS locked in. Plus they have this shot, they try to make this count, to get traction. If AWS moves now it'll be attributed to them. At that point they win by default. (At least that's the theory :))
- Rapzid 5y ago
  Do a lot of people "run" on S3? I'm guess that sort of thin lock-in is perhaps a tiny portion of S3 and AWSs utility billing revenue? Even so, dropping egress fees if they see substantial migration could completely change the calculus on the switching costs for users.
  - pas 5y ago
    Every data processing workload is basically S3 based. Hadoop in the cloud is nothing more than X on HDFS on S3. But egress fees apply for everything, not just S3. Currently cross-cloud or multi-cloud orchestration and/or scheduling makes no sense, because egress fees just make it uneconomical (in most cases). The lower the fee gets the better the numbers will look like for mixing and marching services from providers.

Rapzid 5y ago

I'm really, really confused about all the discussion of R2 as if it were completely fungible with S3. Certainly for certain use cases it could be an alternative. Even as an adjunct to existing S3 use. However without IAM integration, bucket events, and etc. there is a huge set of use cases where it wouldn't even be a blip on peoples radar. Chess vs Go? Couldn't AWS just lower their prices for egress with low to medium(medium for AWS) effort? What am I missing here?

pierofoti 5y ago
The missing IAM functionality is also what is preventing myself moving some services to R2. CloudFlare Workers are not 1:1 with AWS Lambda either, yet they have seen significant improvements, which likely continue to accommodate for more use cases. I suspect R2 will see similar improvements. AWS having high egress fees is the moat around their business. If AWS respond by lowering egress costs then they are opening the fort.

lowbloodsugar 5y ago

Well, they are competing for same market, so whatever game it is, it's the same game. Perhaps it's Fluxx [1], a game where you can change the rules. Perhaps, from the authors perspective it is fight to the death, and AWS is infantry lines against Cloudflare guerrilla warfare. But isn't it simply that Cloudflare is following the disruptors handbook? And therefore isn't AWS most likely fully aware of what Cloudflare is up to and what the avenues (revenues) for attack are, rather than bumbling around playing the wrong game? [1] https://www.looneylabs.com/games/fluxx https://www.looneylabs.com/games/fluxx

polote 5y ago

Cloudflare is a CDN. Nobody is going to use them to store their data even if they are cheaper. If customers cared about price they are already using B2 and B2 is still cheaper than R2. Cloudflare is not eating anyone. They are just trying to expand their TAM. Cloudflare has always been very good at engineering marketing, and R2 is another masterclass but it will never eat S3

maxgashkov 5y ago
Nobody will store their data _now_. If in 2-3-5 yrs it's proven to be both durable & highly available (I'm looking at your maintenance windows, B2) I don't see a lot of reasons not to move away from S3 as this should be plug & play at this point. There will be edge cases for highly regulated businesses of course, but for an average startup why not?
d23 5y ago
> Cloudflare is a CDN. Everyone would readily consider using them to store their data since they're cheaper. Customers that care about price may have cheaper options, but Cloudflare has excellent engineering marketing. > Cloudflare will be eating everyone. They are trying to expand their TAM, and R2 is a masterclass. Figured I'd throw another overconfident unsubstantiated claim into the mix. I was even able to use the same exact points to argue the opposite position.

moonraker 5y ago

I think the argument for Cloudflare successfully "disrupting" AWS is wrong. I'd imagine that Cloudflare's master plan isn't to render Big Cloud obsolete (in a Christiansen/MBA case study sense) . They want to become the edge compute equivalent of Big Cloud (AWS/MSFT/GCP). They've already invested in the physical prescence to do so (similar to the massive fixed cost that it takes to build hyperscale data centers around the world), in a manner that's most valuable to their customers (low latency compute, storage and egress). This isn't disruption: it's new market creation. It just won't be obvious that's the case for another 10-15 years...