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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'

by 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?

by 0xy 5y ago

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?