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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 fo

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.
  - karlerss 5y ago
    The portable thing coming out of this is S3. Your S3 code runs on multiple vendors (and locally, with some hassle) too!
    - Lutger 5y ago
      Agree. S3 has become a defacto standard for object-storage apis.
jimbokun 5y ago
> That said, I remember when I was rooting for Google against Microsoft and Amazom against Walmart. Those were concrete improvements for customers. Better products and pricing and convenience vs. the incumbents. So if new companies can do the same thing to Google and Amazon, all the better.
yholio 5y ago
Is there something that is fundamental to the cloud that promotes vendor lock-in? I can understand it from operating systems and retailers. But is there some fundamental obstacle that prevents most cloud services to be delivered by commodity RFC-compliant vendors? Or maybe some glue software layer, that, once you purchase a license, can abstract away the actual provider and make it simply a price decision? I understand the providers will fight tooth and nail against commoditization, but once the initial wave of innovation and savage competition has passed, do they have a fundamental tool to prevent it?

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.
- karlerss 5y ago
  The portable thing coming out of this is S3. Your S3 code runs on multiple vendors (and locally, with some hassle) too!
  - Lutger 5y ago
    Agree. S3 has become a defacto standard for object-storage apis.

jimbokun 5y ago

> That said, I remember when I was rooting for Google against Microsoft and Amazom against Walmart. Those were concrete improvements for customers. Better products and pricing and convenience vs. the incumbents. So if new companies can do the same thing to Google and Amazon, all the better.

yholio 5y ago

Is there something that is fundamental to the cloud that promotes vendor lock-in? I can understand it from operating systems and retailers. But is there some fundamental obstacle that prevents most cloud services to be delivered by commodity RFC-compliant vendors? Or maybe some glue software layer, that, once you purchase a license, can abstract away the actual provider and make it simply a price decision? I understand the providers will fight tooth and nail against commoditization, but once the initial wave of innovation and savage competition has passed, do they have a fundamental tool to prevent it?