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