8 ms·

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 unde

by 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.
- asim 5y ago
  I think when you say it like this it makes a lot of sense. I'm not a JS dev, that's not my world, but I do understand building primitives for a given audience so if that's their target market makes sense. I just think as they try to battle AWS and explore wider demographics they're going to need to accept some of what that requires. CloudFlare isn't a slick brand like many of the startups around today in JS land. They're playing a different game as a public company so feels like wider adoption is going to require something more. But saying that, I love when companies push the boundaries and CloudFlare are doing that. Conforming to the norms is just becoming another boring IBM like machine.
  - badinfo 5y ago
    What do you mean by "Cloudflare isn't a slick Brand"? I feel like they're the only cloud company that's been doing any real innovation for the last 5-10 years, and in a very approachable and affordable way. What's un-slick about them?
dfdz 5y ago
> 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 I don’t understand your argument. A relatively small but innovative company is working to provide competition against the big 3 cloud providers … and you cringe? Even if their service turns out to be more or less a S3 replicate with better pricing (for some applications involving a fixed amount of data that needs to be widely distributed) it’s a win for consumers and innovation
- svnpenn 5y ago
  Not really. It's a win for CloudFlare, it's a win for capitalism, and yes, it's a temporary win for consumers. But two years from now CloudFlare could be doing the exact same stuff Amazon is doing now, and customers are locked in again, because no source code.
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    Let's be realistic: capitalist organizations should not ever care about source code more than they care about getting money from customers. When you can share code, you do (because "open source" has been a marketing ploy for years now), but when it conflicts with making money, you don't. If they need to lock-in customers to make cash, they will, and if they find themselves a monopoly, they definitely will.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - turk- 5y ago
    This comment doesn't make any sense. I don't see how Cloudflare publishing the source code to their own hosted s3 service would help prevent lockin when an open source alternative to s3 is out there with hdfs. While s3 is a proprietary system, Any programs you write to operate against s3 can also easily be migrated to other object stores (Azure ADLS, Google Object store) with relative ease. The thing that keeps people locked into s3 are egress/bandwidth cost. Until Cloudflare came along, no hosted object store (Google,Azure, including self hosted HDFS onprem or in the cloud) had economical bandwidth/egress costs.
lugged 5y ago
Fan of what exactly? I thought they were great and had them in front of all my sites.. til I tested the SEO impact and removed it from every single site. The perf enhancement was minimal at best, the added costs and complexity overhead simply wasn't worth it. Tried their DNS too, 8.8.8.8 was faster for my network.
- schnebbau 5y ago
  If you don't set up the caching correctly then loading will be slightly slower. If you do, then it will be noticeably faster. Anecdotal of course, but the performance boost lead to an easy SEO jump for our sites.
- brian_herman 5y ago
  8.8.8.8 is google do you mean 1.1.1.1?
  - croes 5y ago
    He said Google's DNS is faster.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  ...til I tested the SEO impact... Any speculation on what could cause this? Do search engines prefer some IP ranges?
- cryptonym 5y ago
  I you don't leverage performance related features of a CDN (mostly cache), it's more a security layer. It won't improve performance until you get your hands dirty or ask a professional to tune it for you (and maybe you did). A global DNS resolver may decrease performance, for instance it can give poor results on DNS based load balancers. Interested to know how you assess SEO impact and your findings.
- atonse 5y ago
  What's the SEO impact with CloudFlare? Isn't that a potential massive conflict of interest if Google is reducing the SEO ranking of sites hosted on their competitors' platforms? If so, yet again, I can't wait for the US DOJ and FTC to just rain hell on these people.
blacktriangle 5y ago
Honestly you touch one one of the reasons I love Heroku so much. I've never seen a service that manages to do so much of the heavy lifting for me, but at the same time be 0 lock-in. I've helped move 2 apps off Heroku once they hit a point where they needed a bit more operational flexibility and there was zero work to disentangle them from Heroku operationally. Try that with AWS, GCE, or anything else.
tyingq 5y ago
>by using very bespoke closed source I don't see that as an issue right now. They are closed source. But the workers and key/value apis are (so far) either close to native, or very simple in nature. Porting away would be fairly straightforward. It may be a space to watch as more features roll out.
FunnyLookinHat 5y ago
> 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. I tend to feel the same as you - preferring portable solutions that I can host anywhere. However, the reality that we're all building CI/CD pipelines as much as we are actual software nowadays, and moving those from one cloud provider to another is no small feat. Even if you're using some infrastructure-as-code tool to manage all of your resources (e.g. terraform), you can't really `SET TARGET=GCP` and re-run the script (so to speak). I guess the lesson is: spend as much time picking your infrastructure provider as you do your core technical stack. They're not easy to replace! :-)
- gls2ro 5y ago
  Great point about CI/CD pipelines being hard to move between cloud providers. I wish someone will do for CI/CD what Docker/k8s did for cloud deployment and provide a non-proprietary structure that can be easily transferred.
  - adamgordonbell 5y ago
    We are building that layer for CI at Earthly. But, depending on your use case, you could also try to describe your build process is some combination of make files and dockerfiles and then just call that from whatever CI you are using.
    - forty 5y ago
      First time I discovered earthly I found it looked cool, but then I encountered the issue that it needed privileged docker which is not really practical in our setup, as this would require launching one VM per build job (we are using gitlab CI) Is it still an issue? If yes, any plan to lift this limitation?
      - adamgordonbell 5y ago
        It is a limitation we want to lift where we can and that we are working on. I'd love to hear more about your use-case. Email is in profile.
winternett 5y ago
Cloudflare needs to innovate more in order to properly be in a position to do long-term battle with Google and AWS. Their overhead cost is a concern. As a free service provider to many sites that use them for encryption, they're possibly primarily benefiting (CDN-Wise) from Google's encryption assertions made in Chrome. A few well-publicized system outages for CloudFlare right now would devastate their entire business model... It's happened. In order to be independently competitive truly, Cloud Flare would need to probably quickly develop a new mobile phone OS, web browser, and scale their cloud hosting to market prominence very quickly in order to be able to preserve their current market share over the long term, which is a very very steep mountain to climb right now. It's a very steep mountain to climb, because Google already has the aforementioned things in place, and AWS is firmly embedded with customers that don't want to face huge costs in refactoring apps. CloudFlare needs to battle Google on many fronts to gain a proper foothold. If I was in leadership, I'd recommend a partnership with a struggling mobile phone company like RIM or Nokia, and possibly with Mozilla on the browser front. Reassuring users about and being committed to upholding personal privacy would be another solid move, and then getting rid of the "utility metered" approach to charging for cloud hosting and introducing simple monthly and annual rates with easier services would likely be ideal moves to ensuring proper growth and market share into the future. This is the chess game that wins from my perspective... As companies like AWS and Azure develop more and more micro-service and licensing-locked cloud platform apps, it becomes harder and much more costly for those same customers to migrate anywhere else like CloudFlare. This is also why competing with giants is a dangerous game. CloudFlare would need to put a lot on the line to compete. The smartest hosting customers often stay liquid in terms of which platform they can leverage and migrate to through chess in development, but the process of getting locked into one host platform is now a very real threat. Overall success has always been a chess game to me. Informed and carefully planned strategy, and conservation of resources, always works best.
systemvoltage 5y ago
I am confused. What would you like about CF that needs to be open sourced? Is it the front end? The datacenter operations software? Their algorithms? How would that solve the problem of portability? If there is anything to cringe, it is emotional appeal to OSS without thinking it through. Cloudflare is a massive service provider, not a database engine. OSS has a huge significance in basic building blocks of software - things like openssl lib.
pwinnski 5y ago
Do you cringe more or less than right now, when Amazon dominates all the markets CloudFlare is trying to enter except one?
streetcat1 5y ago
Last time I recall, AWS nor Gcp nor Azure are open source.

by asim 5y ago

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.

asim 5y ago
I think when you say it like this it makes a lot of sense. I'm not a JS dev, that's not my world, but I do understand building primitives for a given audience so if that's their target market makes sense. I just think as they try to battle AWS and explore wider demographics they're going to need to accept some of what that requires. CloudFlare isn't a slick brand like many of the startups around today in JS land. They're playing a different game as a public company so feels like wider adoption is going to require something more. But saying that, I love when companies push the boundaries and CloudFlare are doing that. Conforming to the norms is just becoming another boring IBM like machine.
- badinfo 5y ago
  What do you mean by "Cloudflare isn't a slick Brand"? I feel like they're the only cloud company that's been doing any real innovation for the last 5-10 years, and in a very approachable and affordable way. What's un-slick about them?

dfdz 5y ago

> 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 I don’t understand your argument. A relatively small but innovative company is working to provide competition against the big 3 cloud providers … and you cringe? Even if their service turns out to be more or less a S3 replicate with better pricing (for some applications involving a fixed amount of data that needs to be widely distributed) it’s a win for consumers and innovation

svnpenn 5y ago
Not really. It's a win for CloudFlare, it's a win for capitalism, and yes, it's a temporary win for consumers. But two years from now CloudFlare could be doing the exact same stuff Amazon is doing now, and customers are locked in again, because no source code.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Let's be realistic: capitalist organizations should not ever care about source code more than they care about getting money from customers. When you can share code, you do (because "open source" has been a marketing ploy for years now), but when it conflicts with making money, you don't. If they need to lock-in customers to make cash, they will, and if they find themselves a monopoly, they definitely will.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- turk- 5y ago
  This comment doesn't make any sense. I don't see how Cloudflare publishing the source code to their own hosted s3 service would help prevent lockin when an open source alternative to s3 is out there with hdfs. While s3 is a proprietary system, Any programs you write to operate against s3 can also easily be migrated to other object stores (Azure ADLS, Google Object store) with relative ease. The thing that keeps people locked into s3 are egress/bandwidth cost. Until Cloudflare came along, no hosted object store (Google,Azure, including self hosted HDFS onprem or in the cloud) had economical bandwidth/egress costs.

lugged 5y ago

Fan of what exactly? I thought they were great and had them in front of all my sites.. til I tested the SEO impact and removed it from every single site. The perf enhancement was minimal at best, the added costs and complexity overhead simply wasn't worth it. Tried their DNS too, 8.8.8.8 was faster for my network.

schnebbau 5y ago
If you don't set up the caching correctly then loading will be slightly slower. If you do, then it will be noticeably faster. Anecdotal of course, but the performance boost lead to an easy SEO jump for our sites.
brian_herman 5y ago
8.8.8.8 is google do you mean 1.1.1.1?
- croes 5y ago
  He said Google's DNS is faster.
jessaustin 5y ago
...til I tested the SEO impact... Any speculation on what could cause this? Do search engines prefer some IP ranges?
cryptonym 5y ago
I you don't leverage performance related features of a CDN (mostly cache), it's more a security layer. It won't improve performance until you get your hands dirty or ask a professional to tune it for you (and maybe you did). A global DNS resolver may decrease performance, for instance it can give poor results on DNS based load balancers. Interested to know how you assess SEO impact and your findings.
atonse 5y ago
What's the SEO impact with CloudFlare? Isn't that a potential massive conflict of interest if Google is reducing the SEO ranking of sites hosted on their competitors' platforms? If so, yet again, I can't wait for the US DOJ and FTC to just rain hell on these people.

blacktriangle 5y ago

Honestly you touch one one of the reasons I love Heroku so much. I've never seen a service that manages to do so much of the heavy lifting for me, but at the same time be 0 lock-in. I've helped move 2 apps off Heroku once they hit a point where they needed a bit more operational flexibility and there was zero work to disentangle them from Heroku operationally. Try that with AWS, GCE, or anything else.

tyingq 5y ago

>by using very bespoke closed source I don't see that as an issue right now. They are closed source. But the workers and key/value apis are (so far) either close to native, or very simple in nature. Porting away would be fairly straightforward. It may be a space to watch as more features roll out.

FunnyLookinHat 5y ago

> 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. I tend to feel the same as you - preferring portable solutions that I can host anywhere. However, the reality that we're all building CI/CD pipelines as much as we are actual software nowadays, and moving those from one cloud provider to another is no small feat. Even if you're using some infrastructure-as-code tool to manage all of your resources (e.g. terraform), you can't really `SET TARGET=GCP` and re-run the script (so to speak). I guess the lesson is: spend as much time picking your infrastructure provider as you do your core technical stack. They're not easy to replace! :-)

gls2ro 5y ago
Great point about CI/CD pipelines being hard to move between cloud providers. I wish someone will do for CI/CD what Docker/k8s did for cloud deployment and provide a non-proprietary structure that can be easily transferred.
- adamgordonbell 5y ago
  We are building that layer for CI at Earthly. But, depending on your use case, you could also try to describe your build process is some combination of make files and dockerfiles and then just call that from whatever CI you are using.
  - forty 5y ago
    First time I discovered earthly I found it looked cool, but then I encountered the issue that it needed privileged docker which is not really practical in our setup, as this would require launching one VM per build job (we are using gitlab CI) Is it still an issue? If yes, any plan to lift this limitation?
    - adamgordonbell 5y ago
      It is a limitation we want to lift where we can and that we are working on. I'd love to hear more about your use-case. Email is in profile.

winternett 5y ago

Cloudflare needs to innovate more in order to properly be in a position to do long-term battle with Google and AWS. Their overhead cost is a concern. As a free service provider to many sites that use them for encryption, they're possibly primarily benefiting (CDN-Wise) from Google's encryption assertions made in Chrome. A few well-publicized system outages for CloudFlare right now would devastate their entire business model... It's happened. In order to be independently competitive truly, Cloud Flare would need to probably quickly develop a new mobile phone OS, web browser, and scale their cloud hosting to market prominence very quickly in order to be able to preserve their current market share over the long term, which is a very very steep mountain to climb right now. It's a very steep mountain to climb, because Google already has the aforementioned things in place, and AWS is firmly embedded with customers that don't want to face huge costs in refactoring apps. CloudFlare needs to battle Google on many fronts to gain a proper foothold. If I was in leadership, I'd recommend a partnership with a struggling mobile phone company like RIM or Nokia, and possibly with Mozilla on the browser front. Reassuring users about and being committed to upholding personal privacy would be another solid move, and then getting rid of the "utility metered" approach to charging for cloud hosting and introducing simple monthly and annual rates with easier services would likely be ideal moves to ensuring proper growth and market share into the future. This is the chess game that wins from my perspective... As companies like AWS and Azure develop more and more micro-service and licensing-locked cloud platform apps, it becomes harder and much more costly for those same customers to migrate anywhere else like CloudFlare. This is also why competing with giants is a dangerous game. CloudFlare would need to put a lot on the line to compete. The smartest hosting customers often stay liquid in terms of which platform they can leverage and migrate to through chess in development, but the process of getting locked into one host platform is now a very real threat. Overall success has always been a chess game to me. Informed and carefully planned strategy, and conservation of resources, always works best.

systemvoltage 5y ago

I am confused. What would you like about CF that needs to be open sourced? Is it the front end? The datacenter operations software? Their algorithms? How would that solve the problem of portability? If there is anything to cringe, it is emotional appeal to OSS without thinking it through. Cloudflare is a massive service provider, not a database engine. OSS has a huge significance in basic building blocks of software - things like openssl lib.

pwinnski 5y ago

Do you cringe more or less than right now, when Amazon dominates all the markets CloudFlare is trying to enter except one?

streetcat1 5y ago

Last time I recall, AWS nor Gcp nor Azure are open source.