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> 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 th

by 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
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- deleted 5y ago
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- 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.
- cybernautique 5y ago
  This is actually one of those instances where I'm not sure how open sourcing a product would make it freer. Don't cloud providers make their dime by what-they-have, i.e. your data, instead of what-they-do (i.e., the source code)? As far as I understand, it's the prices of ingress vs egress that act as the mortar in these particular gardens. Like if Facebook went full open-source... how does that help, if they retain sole custodianship of my data?
- 35fbe7d3d5b9 5y ago
  > 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. I hear this argument often but it always rings hollow. A friend had a first gen iPod – when he wanted to switch, he discovered that the music he bought on iTunes couldn't be moved anywhere else because of DRM. That's lock in. But this morning I was looking at the source code of an app built against the Serverless framework[1] and what I'm seeing is a bog standard WSGI application that uses a library to transform the inbound AWS "proprietary bits" into WSGI[2]. I'm not worried about lock-in there because all API Gateway + Lambda do is "translate an HTTP request into a JSON object and toss it to an app"[3] – what source code am I missing? The underlying Lambda/APIGW code? OK, but do I need it to run it myself? Not really. Many – most? – AWS products tend towards this analysis. S3 is so locked in that, what, we now have multiple very high quality alternatives that are API compatible? The real risk of cloud vendor lock in, from where I sit, comes from egregious pricing models that make it cheap to get data in & expensive to push data out. But I'm not sure Cloudflare has the juice to make this play work: egress pricing is essentially free money for AWS, so they've got lots of room to cut costs there – from what I've heard from people who negotiate real bills with AWS, they're very happy to give you discounts there. [1]: https://github.com/serverless/examples/tree/master/aws-python-flask-api https://github.com/serverless/examples/tree/master/aws-pytho... [2]: https://github.com/logandk/serverless-wsgi https://github.com/logandk/serverless-wsgi [3]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/set-up-lambda-proxy-integrations.html#api-gateway-simple-proxy-for-lambda-input-format https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide...
- mcherm 5y ago
  These are not applications, they are services. Which means that the REAL question isn't whether they open-source the code (not saying it wouldn't be nice... but it may come with lots of dependencies about their environment that wouldn't be easily replicable elsewhere) but whether their API is open. And in the case of R2, they mimicked the API for S3. Which is as close to "following a standard" as I think it's possible to get.
boringg 5y ago
How does an additional S3 replica with better pricing help the market/innovation except adding one more competitor? And if that's all they end up offering (as per your statement) their cost is to high.
- prepend 5y ago
  > except adding one more competitor? This is a really good reason. More competitors is good for me.
arcbyte 5y ago
I mean competition overall is a great thing. Personally I wouldn't bemoan disruption of Google et al by Cloudflare. That said, I remember when I was rooting for Google against Microsoft and Amazom against Walmart. Before my time people rooted for Microsoft against IBM. Sometimes we want things to become a little more timeless like Linux or HTML where it is democratized and much freer and slower to chamge.
- turdnagel 5y ago
  On the one hand, I hear what you're saying. You root for the underdog long enough and they end up becoming the dominant player with the power to match. But this feels like a pretty apples-to-oranges comparison to me. Cloudflare has to buy, operate, and maintain huge amounts of servers with lots of hard drives, plus all the fiber/copper connecting them across the planet. Linux and HTML are software. They're only "decentralized" in the sense that they don't physically exist anywhere the way that a cloud provider absolutely must.
  - Lutger 5y ago
    Cloudflare is still software. We consume these services by writing code after all. Another example would be postgres. I can rent postgres, including whatever hardware is used to power it, from AWS, GCP or Azure. Or anybody really, like DigitalOcean or Heroku. My 'postgres' code will run on every vendors service. The same applies to containers. That is how I understood the comment 'Linux and HTML', something that is standard and universal, that affords portability and let's vendors compete on quality rather than relying on vendor lockin.
    - turdnagel 5y ago
      Yes, CloudFlare has software, and I think that only further highlights the difference between a complex cloud provider and a piece of software. What good is CloudFlare's software without the vast global network to back it up? Pick a problem, though, and there's probably an open source solution though: CockroachDB for global HA dbs, there's a bunch of containerized drop-in S3 API replacements, etc. But something tying them all together requires a lot of ops work that you don't get through software alone.
nuerow 5y ago
> 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? Cloudflare is by no means a small hosting provider. By some accounts, cloudflare is world's leading CDN provider by a long margin, far ahead of AWS in this market, and it currently piles up about half a billion dollars in revenue. https://blog.intricately.com/2020-state-of-the-cdn-industry-trends-market-share-customer-size https://blog.intricately.com/2020-state-of-the-cdn-industry-...
- nvarsj 5y ago
  That report is very misleading. Customer count is a useless metric for a CDN. If you looked at total traffic and spend, Cloudflare would be dwarfed.
  - andrewnyr 5y ago
    It is when about 18% of the internet runs through Cloudflare.
    - motives 5y ago
      Source? Assuming you're talking about 18% of traffic and not percentage of websites, how do you define what counts as traffic in that case? Transfer between AS's? Does internal traffic within AS's count? Does traffic between entities within the same AS count (e.g traffic from one AWS customer to another, or traffic from a Netflix OCA to an ISP?) I'm skeptical of any entities ability to fully measure the throughput of the internet even remotely accurately. The closest estimate you'll likely get is if you're a transit provider able to measure data transfer, and even then you'll be lucky to extrapolate within the correct order of magnitude from that for total global inter-AS traffic.
      - collinmanderson 5y ago
        The 18% likely comes from here (% of websites) https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy
kortilla 5y ago
> A relatively small but innovative compan Cloud flare is massive in internet impact and is a publicly traded corporation worth billions. There is nothing small here. > … and you cringe? Of course, the end game is exactly the same for cloudflare. A proprietary solution that locks you into their platform instead of AWS’s or GCP’s. Oh how people have forgotten was open source was about in the 90s and 00s.

by dfdz 5y ago

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.
cybernautique 5y ago
This is actually one of those instances where I'm not sure how open sourcing a product would make it freer. Don't cloud providers make their dime by what-they-have, i.e. your data, instead of what-they-do (i.e., the source code)? As far as I understand, it's the prices of ingress vs egress that act as the mortar in these particular gardens. Like if Facebook went full open-source... how does that help, if they retain sole custodianship of my data?
35fbe7d3d5b9 5y ago
> 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. I hear this argument often but it always rings hollow. A friend had a first gen iPod – when he wanted to switch, he discovered that the music he bought on iTunes couldn't be moved anywhere else because of DRM. That's lock in. But this morning I was looking at the source code of an app built against the Serverless framework[1] and what I'm seeing is a bog standard WSGI application that uses a library to transform the inbound AWS "proprietary bits" into WSGI[2]. I'm not worried about lock-in there because all API Gateway + Lambda do is "translate an HTTP request into a JSON object and toss it to an app"[3] – what source code am I missing? The underlying Lambda/APIGW code? OK, but do I need it to run it myself? Not really. Many – most? – AWS products tend towards this analysis. S3 is so locked in that, what, we now have multiple very high quality alternatives that are API compatible? The real risk of cloud vendor lock in, from where I sit, comes from egregious pricing models that make it cheap to get data in & expensive to push data out. But I'm not sure Cloudflare has the juice to make this play work: egress pricing is essentially free money for AWS, so they've got lots of room to cut costs there – from what I've heard from people who negotiate real bills with AWS, they're very happy to give you discounts there. [1]: https://github.com/serverless/examples/tree/master/aws-python-flask-api https://github.com/serverless/examples/tree/master/aws-pytho... [2]: https://github.com/logandk/serverless-wsgi https://github.com/logandk/serverless-wsgi [3]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/set-up-lambda-proxy-integrations.html#api-gateway-simple-proxy-for-lambda-input-format https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide...
mcherm 5y ago
These are not applications, they are services. Which means that the REAL question isn't whether they open-source the code (not saying it wouldn't be nice... but it may come with lots of dependencies about their environment that wouldn't be easily replicable elsewhere) but whether their API is open. And in the case of R2, they mimicked the API for S3. Which is as close to "following a standard" as I think it's possible to get.

boringg 5y ago

How does an additional S3 replica with better pricing help the market/innovation except adding one more competitor? And if that's all they end up offering (as per your statement) their cost is to high.

prepend 5y ago
> except adding one more competitor? This is a really good reason. More competitors is good for me.

arcbyte 5y ago

I mean competition overall is a great thing. Personally I wouldn't bemoan disruption of Google et al by Cloudflare. That said, I remember when I was rooting for Google against Microsoft and Amazom against Walmart. Before my time people rooted for Microsoft against IBM. Sometimes we want things to become a little more timeless like Linux or HTML where it is democratized and much freer and slower to chamge.

turdnagel 5y ago
On the one hand, I hear what you're saying. You root for the underdog long enough and they end up becoming the dominant player with the power to match. But this feels like a pretty apples-to-oranges comparison to me. Cloudflare has to buy, operate, and maintain huge amounts of servers with lots of hard drives, plus all the fiber/copper connecting them across the planet. Linux and HTML are software. They're only "decentralized" in the sense that they don't physically exist anywhere the way that a cloud provider absolutely must.
- Lutger 5y ago
  Cloudflare is still software. We consume these services by writing code after all. Another example would be postgres. I can rent postgres, including whatever hardware is used to power it, from AWS, GCP or Azure. Or anybody really, like DigitalOcean or Heroku. My 'postgres' code will run on every vendors service. The same applies to containers. That is how I understood the comment 'Linux and HTML', something that is standard and universal, that affords portability and let's vendors compete on quality rather than relying on vendor lockin.
  - turdnagel 5y ago
    Yes, CloudFlare has software, and I think that only further highlights the difference between a complex cloud provider and a piece of software. What good is CloudFlare's software without the vast global network to back it up? Pick a problem, though, and there's probably an open source solution though: CockroachDB for global HA dbs, there's a bunch of containerized drop-in S3 API replacements, etc. But something tying them all together requires a lot of ops work that you don't get through software alone.

nuerow 5y ago

> 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? Cloudflare is by no means a small hosting provider. By some accounts, cloudflare is world's leading CDN provider by a long margin, far ahead of AWS in this market, and it currently piles up about half a billion dollars in revenue. https://blog.intricately.com/2020-state-of-the-cdn-industry-trends-market-share-customer-size https://blog.intricately.com/2020-state-of-the-cdn-industry-...

nvarsj 5y ago
That report is very misleading. Customer count is a useless metric for a CDN. If you looked at total traffic and spend, Cloudflare would be dwarfed.
- andrewnyr 5y ago
  It is when about 18% of the internet runs through Cloudflare.
  - motives 5y ago
    Source? Assuming you're talking about 18% of traffic and not percentage of websites, how do you define what counts as traffic in that case? Transfer between AS's? Does internal traffic within AS's count? Does traffic between entities within the same AS count (e.g traffic from one AWS customer to another, or traffic from a Netflix OCA to an ISP?) I'm skeptical of any entities ability to fully measure the throughput of the internet even remotely accurately. The closest estimate you'll likely get is if you're a transit provider able to measure data transfer, and even then you'll be lucky to extrapolate within the correct order of magnitude from that for total global inter-AS traffic.
    - collinmanderson 5y ago
      The 18% likely comes from here (% of websites) https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy

kortilla 5y ago

> A relatively small but innovative compan Cloud flare is massive in internet impact and is a publicly traded corporation worth billions. There is nothing small here. > … and you cringe? Of course, the end game is exactly the same for cloudflare. A proprietary solution that locks you into their platform instead of AWS’s or GCP’s. Oh how people have forgotten was open source was about in the 90s and 00s.