6 ms·

Cloudflare’s Pace of Innovation

88 points by tmlee 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
0xy 5y ago
Cloudflare has a dizzying pace of product development that seems to be unmatched even among the large cloud providers. I suspect in the next 12-24 months they'll have an entire edge solution that is superior to all 3 of the top cloud providers in cost, performance and features. Workers is nearly there. They are missing some kind of global database, instrumentation and a few other small features before Workers is truly unleashed. If Cloudflare were smart, they'd scoop up Fly.io. The two would work together like peanut butter and jelly on the edge, and the big 3 would simply have no response to the potent combination of a great product at a great price. My favorite thing about Cloudflare is the "trojan horse" pricing strategy. By selling core functionality like security and CDNs cheap, it enables engineers to build on it for side projects and to experiment. Those engineers then go to big companies and pitch it to their managers, which provides Cloudflare with an internal advocate from the bottom-up. It's a genius strategy, and they get the added bonus of looking like the good guys (most generous free tier going around). (disclosure: long $NET)
- heisnotanalien 5y ago
  What do you mean unmatched even among large cloud providers? AWS doesn't innovate fast?
  - 0xy 5y ago
    No, they don't. Why do you think Amazon retail isn't using CloudFront for mission critical product images? It's because it sucks, and that team knows it. Amazon retail signed a huge deal with Fastly for content delivery. Lambda@Edge is even worse. Horrible developer experience, bad pricing, and wishy-washy performance. I know I'm biased, but I'm also currently an AWS customer as well and use them every day. From a customer perspective, it sucks. All of their products are 7/10 tier at 15/10 price. AWS Cognito is a 7/10 to Auth0's 9/10, for example. They don't have any class-leading products on an individual level. They are only competitive when you zoom out and realize AWS is a true one stop shop. But, like Cloudflare says, it's Hotel California. There's a literal exit tax to leave AWS.
- jbergstroem 5y ago
  I've been deploying a lot of stuff on cloudflare over the years and have for a few months been using fly.io. As you say, they should slurp them up asap and make the cloudflare services available under `.internal`.
- Scarbutt 5y ago
  (disclosure: long $NET) You think the giants will just sit there dormant?
  - geodel 5y ago
    Nope. I'd think giants will fumble aggressively.
- bob1029 5y ago
  > I suspect in the next 12-24 months they'll have an entire edge solution that is superior to all 3 of the top cloud providers in cost, performance and features. I have been totally immersed in their ecosystem trying to see how much value exists here. Seems like CF might have already hit this objective. Between workers - which now support websockets(!) - and durable objects (which is basically MS Orleans), there is a very compelling offering on the table now for new kinds of hyperscalar+collaborative apps. No telling how the pricing and investor influence will play out over the long term. I did just pick up some shares myself after seeing all these docs over the last ~48 hours.
- Thaxll 5y ago
  Every time I see those comments, I just wonder exactly what can you build on Cloudflare? besically nothing? do you have compute, do you have load balancing, do you have rbac, do you have DB? do you have storage? Please enlight me.
  - Strom 5y ago
    > do you have compute, do you have load balancing, do you have rbac, do you have DB? do you have storage? Yes, they have all of those things. They have a pretty decent webpage that goes into more detail. https://www.cloudflare.com/ https://www.cloudflare.com/
    - Thaxll 5y ago
      They have workers which are serverless which only work for a specific kind of application, how do I connect that app to a database? what do I do to get metrics / logs out of it, monitoring / alerts? as I said they have nothing even close to what cloud providers have.
    - anaganisk 5y ago
      That doesn’t answer the question at all? Cloudflare workers are just a glorified rule engine running on the nearest cache server, I still fail to see how a rule engine is supposed to be disrupting anything more than a static or a very simple web app.
      - jgrahamc 5y ago
        No, it's not. It allows you to run arbitrary code. It's not a rule engine.
        anaganisk 5y ago
        So what? Whats the perceived benefit? How many apps can you run on a key value store? All use cases I came across are just glorified rule engines. If you say you can connect it to a DB, and your DB is still hosted on cloud somewhere else, what benefit does it provide in terms of speed?
newscracker 5y ago
First and foremost, this is a nice recruitment post. Not that it’s devious in any way. While Cloudflare has introduced many industry disrupting features, the pace of innovation isn’t that fast if you look a bit deeper. For example, it only took like three years or longer for domain registration to be available for new domains (it was only transfers until then). The reason given for this on a HN comment was a non-answer. If you visit the forums on Cloudflare, you’ll also see different kinds of billing related issues that, while they may be a bit complex, are not responded to as well as one might expect. Nevertheless, Cloudflare is doing a lot of stuff that will prod the competition to wake up (or just let them die).
- AznHisoka 5y ago
  Domain registration is a commodity these days, and there are plenty of providers in that area. Why would Cloudflare want to spend much resources innovating on that, when there are other things they can do?
  - bern4444 5y ago
    Domain registration is one of the first things you have to do when creating a website. If you want to register a domain and see you can do so on cloudflare, I'm sure it will bring people who otherwise would have registered on godaddy or namecheap into cloudflare and get those customers introduced to cloudflare's services. It's a lead generator and gets people into using cloudflare earlier.
  - corobo 5y ago
    Because now when someone registers a domain they're instantly a part of the Cloudflare ecosystem. No faffing with getting them to update nameservers Sell the domain at cost now and the paid products later
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Nice up-sell and cross-sell opportunities every time someone manages, renews, etc, their domain. And inserts into renewal, login-notice emails, etc. Selling domain registration at cost is a smart move for them.
boringg 5y ago
Cloudflare's take on cloudfare's pace of innovation. I am curious if it's highly innovative built with strong engineering fundamentals with breakneck product delivery to a large audience of clients or if poorly architectured in an antiquated programming language and not achieving product-market fit? As per other commenter said - nice recruitment post.
rvz 5y ago
So it turns out that Cloudflare was the 'smart' train to board after calling it two years ago [0] and buying it on IPO day gave anyone who boarded it (including me) 900% returns. Now they announced more updates in the pipeline which justifies the valuation. Always providing great shareholder value as usual. It was only just getting started to go much higher. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306
robinoh 5y ago
Yet their interface has been on a downhill with regards to responsiveness.
polote 5y ago
In the honor of this comment about Stripe 3 years ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16880635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16880635 We've reached peak Cloudflare glorification.
- ferdowsi 5y ago
  Peak glorification will happen when Cloudflare puts out a blog post about rewriting their entire stack in Rust.
  - steveklabnik 5y ago
    Cloudflare does already use a significant amount of Rust, blogs about it, and they are usually well received.
- skrtskrt 5y ago
  Given the slovenly praise of Cloudflare on HN, I was pretty surprised to see on Glassdoor that their engineers seem pretty unhappy - stressed, overworked, underpaid, and mistreated by leadership. Cloudflare is just big enough that there’s enough Glassdoor reviews from engineers to show a pretty consistent pattern. Considering how companies try to game Glassdoor, a lot of positive sentiment should be taken with a big grain of salt, but any consistent negative pattern is alarming.
pixelgeek 5y ago
I was hoping that it was an article by a third party as I have actually been interested in the rate at which they have been releasing new products and tech. The comment about eating their own dogfood and the development of Workers makes me wonder if anyone at AWS uses AWS

88 points by tmlee 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

0xy 5y ago

Cloudflare has a dizzying pace of product development that seems to be unmatched even among the large cloud providers. I suspect in the next 12-24 months they'll have an entire edge solution that is superior to all 3 of the top cloud providers in cost, performance and features. Workers is nearly there. They are missing some kind of global database, instrumentation and a few other small features before Workers is truly unleashed. If Cloudflare were smart, they'd scoop up Fly.io. The two would work together like peanut butter and jelly on the edge, and the big 3 would simply have no response to the potent combination of a great product at a great price. My favorite thing about Cloudflare is the "trojan horse" pricing strategy. By selling core functionality like security and CDNs cheap, it enables engineers to build on it for side projects and to experiment. Those engineers then go to big companies and pitch it to their managers, which provides Cloudflare with an internal advocate from the bottom-up. It's a genius strategy, and they get the added bonus of looking like the good guys (most generous free tier going around). (disclosure: long $NET)

heisnotanalien 5y ago
What do you mean unmatched even among large cloud providers? AWS doesn't innovate fast?
- 0xy 5y ago
  No, they don't. Why do you think Amazon retail isn't using CloudFront for mission critical product images? It's because it sucks, and that team knows it. Amazon retail signed a huge deal with Fastly for content delivery. Lambda@Edge is even worse. Horrible developer experience, bad pricing, and wishy-washy performance. I know I'm biased, but I'm also currently an AWS customer as well and use them every day. From a customer perspective, it sucks. All of their products are 7/10 tier at 15/10 price. AWS Cognito is a 7/10 to Auth0's 9/10, for example. They don't have any class-leading products on an individual level. They are only competitive when you zoom out and realize AWS is a true one stop shop. But, like Cloudflare says, it's Hotel California. There's a literal exit tax to leave AWS.
jbergstroem 5y ago
I've been deploying a lot of stuff on cloudflare over the years and have for a few months been using fly.io. As you say, they should slurp them up asap and make the cloudflare services available under `.internal`.
Scarbutt 5y ago
(disclosure: long $NET) You think the giants will just sit there dormant?
- geodel 5y ago
  Nope. I'd think giants will fumble aggressively.
bob1029 5y ago
> I suspect in the next 12-24 months they'll have an entire edge solution that is superior to all 3 of the top cloud providers in cost, performance and features. I have been totally immersed in their ecosystem trying to see how much value exists here. Seems like CF might have already hit this objective. Between workers - which now support websockets(!) - and durable objects (which is basically MS Orleans), there is a very compelling offering on the table now for new kinds of hyperscalar+collaborative apps. No telling how the pricing and investor influence will play out over the long term. I did just pick up some shares myself after seeing all these docs over the last ~48 hours.
Thaxll 5y ago
Every time I see those comments, I just wonder exactly what can you build on Cloudflare? besically nothing? do you have compute, do you have load balancing, do you have rbac, do you have DB? do you have storage? Please enlight me.
- Strom 5y ago
  > do you have compute, do you have load balancing, do you have rbac, do you have DB? do you have storage? Yes, they have all of those things. They have a pretty decent webpage that goes into more detail. https://www.cloudflare.com/ https://www.cloudflare.com/
  - Thaxll 5y ago
    They have workers which are serverless which only work for a specific kind of application, how do I connect that app to a database? what do I do to get metrics / logs out of it, monitoring / alerts? as I said they have nothing even close to what cloud providers have.
  - anaganisk 5y ago
    That doesn’t answer the question at all? Cloudflare workers are just a glorified rule engine running on the nearest cache server, I still fail to see how a rule engine is supposed to be disrupting anything more than a static or a very simple web app.
    - jgrahamc 5y ago
      No, it's not. It allows you to run arbitrary code. It's not a rule engine.
      - anaganisk 5y ago
        So what? Whats the perceived benefit? How many apps can you run on a key value store? All use cases I came across are just glorified rule engines. If you say you can connect it to a DB, and your DB is still hosted on cloud somewhere else, what benefit does it provide in terms of speed?

newscracker 5y ago

First and foremost, this is a nice recruitment post. Not that it’s devious in any way. While Cloudflare has introduced many industry disrupting features, the pace of innovation isn’t that fast if you look a bit deeper. For example, it only took like three years or longer for domain registration to be available for new domains (it was only transfers until then). The reason given for this on a HN comment was a non-answer. If you visit the forums on Cloudflare, you’ll also see different kinds of billing related issues that, while they may be a bit complex, are not responded to as well as one might expect. Nevertheless, Cloudflare is doing a lot of stuff that will prod the competition to wake up (or just let them die).

AznHisoka 5y ago
Domain registration is a commodity these days, and there are plenty of providers in that area. Why would Cloudflare want to spend much resources innovating on that, when there are other things they can do?
- bern4444 5y ago
  Domain registration is one of the first things you have to do when creating a website. If you want to register a domain and see you can do so on cloudflare, I'm sure it will bring people who otherwise would have registered on godaddy or namecheap into cloudflare and get those customers introduced to cloudflare's services. It's a lead generator and gets people into using cloudflare earlier.
- corobo 5y ago
  Because now when someone registers a domain they're instantly a part of the Cloudflare ecosystem. No faffing with getting them to update nameservers Sell the domain at cost now and the paid products later
- tyingq 5y ago
  Nice up-sell and cross-sell opportunities every time someone manages, renews, etc, their domain. And inserts into renewal, login-notice emails, etc. Selling domain registration at cost is a smart move for them.

boringg 5y ago

Cloudflare's take on cloudfare's pace of innovation. I am curious if it's highly innovative built with strong engineering fundamentals with breakneck product delivery to a large audience of clients or if poorly architectured in an antiquated programming language and not achieving product-market fit? As per other commenter said - nice recruitment post.

rvz 5y ago

So it turns out that Cloudflare was the 'smart' train to board after calling it two years ago [0] and buying it on IPO day gave anyone who boarded it (including me) 900% returns. Now they announced more updates in the pipeline which justifies the valuation. Always providing great shareholder value as usual. It was only just getting started to go much higher. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306

robinoh 5y ago

Yet their interface has been on a downhill with regards to responsiveness.

polote 5y ago

In the honor of this comment about Stripe 3 years ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16880635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16880635 We've reached peak Cloudflare glorification.

ferdowsi 5y ago
Peak glorification will happen when Cloudflare puts out a blog post about rewriting their entire stack in Rust.
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  Cloudflare does already use a significant amount of Rust, blogs about it, and they are usually well received.
skrtskrt 5y ago
Given the slovenly praise of Cloudflare on HN, I was pretty surprised to see on Glassdoor that their engineers seem pretty unhappy - stressed, overworked, underpaid, and mistreated by leadership. Cloudflare is just big enough that there’s enough Glassdoor reviews from engineers to show a pretty consistent pattern. Considering how companies try to game Glassdoor, a lot of positive sentiment should be taken with a big grain of salt, but any consistent negative pattern is alarming.

pixelgeek 5y ago

I was hoping that it was an article by a third party as I have actually been interested in the rate at which they have been releasing new products and tech. The comment about eating their own dogfood and the development of Workers makes me wonder if anyone at AWS uses AWS