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Cloudflare. Between Pages, Speed, Access, Workers, durable objects, KV store, R2, Images, etc they’re maybe a small handful of product releases away from being

Cloudflare. Between Pages, Speed, Access, Workers, durable objects, KV store, R2, Images, etc they’re maybe a small handful of product releases away from being able to replace the providers you mentioned for many users and applications. Plus I’d wager that many applications can be built 100% on Cloudflare today (and are). Benefits? - Pricing. Compare pricing on Workers to functions across those platforms as one example. For many use cases you can use the Bundled pricing model. It’s insanely cheap. Crazy cheap. Then start looking at pricing on bandwidth (ESPECIALLY BANDWIDTH), KV, R2, DO, etc. You’ll be pleased. - Pace and market disruption. AWS is 20 years old. That makes them essentially the IBM of cloud. No one ever got fired for buying AWS but seriously compare uptime, pricing, etc. - Speed, uptime, performance. Cloudflare’s edge network and architecture is truly impressive. KV store? Workers? R2? Durable objects? Forget worrying about regions, etc. All of this and more runs at their edge in more than 270 cities worldwide. - Less vendor lock-in, more standards. R2 is S3 compatible. Workers are actually WebWorkers. Pages is Jamstack. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Workers (as one example) have 2x the performance at 1/4 the cost compared to Lambda. Then start looking at bandwidth… In my mind where AWS truly shines is exactly why they’re the IBM of cloud. Support for enterprise, government, etc. Really complicated access and management, regulatory requirements, extensive customer requirements, an entire cottage industry and ecosystem of consultants for everything you can imagine, various supplemental SaaS offerings, the list goes on. Everyone likes to think you can’t go wrong even just starting out with AWS. I don’t like to crush dreams but the reality is most efforts fail in a year or less and only what, maybe 1/10,00,000 projects/companies will ever need the full scale of what I just listed. Not shilling Cloudflare - just a happy customer who’s truly baffled why Cloudflare’s full product suite isn’t leveraged more often and more fully. Also forgot to mention - for compute providers, other storage, bandwidth, etc look at their bandwidth alliance. Free bandwidth to/from any of the members.

booi 5y ago
That’s all great and amazing for the edge but not for general compute which the majority of applications still need. Yes you probably could design it with just workers but most popular frameworks just don’t lend themselves well to that and using things like accessing private databases from workers is still hairy at best and almost certainly not certifiable.
altdataseller 5y ago
How can I store my distributed business data on Cloudflare and run regular SQL queries on it? How can I get a message queue on Cloudflare and have hundreds of servers read and write to it? How can I get run a Lucene search index on Cloudflare and search against it? Also R2 is still in beta development
- kkielhofner 5y ago
  If it’s not a good fit it’s not a good fit, we have choice! However, as I said the vast majority of applications don’t involve message queues for hundreds of servers or Lucene. Many not even SQL. I also pointed to compute and bandwidth alliance members that augment Cloudflare very well so you can build whatever you want while still taking advantage of the Cloudflare edge. Or put Cloudflare as a CDN or augment with what they do have in front of whatever cloud you want. Azure and GCP are limited members of the alliance that offer reduced pricing egress to Cloudflare.
stunt 5y ago
I promised myself that I would never try to learn Cloudflare until it made its pricing clearer and easier to calculate. How do they expect someone to use their services when no one can do a simple math without contacting their sales team? How hard is for them to build something similar to https://calculator.aws https://calculator.aws ?
jeffrallen 5y ago
Also: really nice employees that also post here from time to time.
poisonta 5y ago
I only like Clouflare as a security company.

booi 5y ago

That’s all great and amazing for the edge but not for general compute which the majority of applications still need. Yes you probably could design it with just workers but most popular frameworks just don’t lend themselves well to that and using things like accessing private databases from workers is still hairy at best and almost certainly not certifiable.

altdataseller 5y ago

How can I store my distributed business data on Cloudflare and run regular SQL queries on it? How can I get a message queue on Cloudflare and have hundreds of servers read and write to it? How can I get run a Lucene search index on Cloudflare and search against it? Also R2 is still in beta development

kkielhofner 5y ago
If it’s not a good fit it’s not a good fit, we have choice! However, as I said the vast majority of applications don’t involve message queues for hundreds of servers or Lucene. Many not even SQL. I also pointed to compute and bandwidth alliance members that augment Cloudflare very well so you can build whatever you want while still taking advantage of the Cloudflare edge. Or put Cloudflare as a CDN or augment with what they do have in front of whatever cloud you want. Azure and GCP are limited members of the alliance that offer reduced pricing egress to Cloudflare.

stunt 5y ago

I promised myself that I would never try to learn Cloudflare until it made its pricing clearer and easier to calculate. How do they expect someone to use their services when no one can do a simple math without contacting their sales team? How hard is for them to build something similar to https://calculator.aws https://calculator.aws ?

jeffrallen 5y ago

Also: really nice employees that also post here from time to time.

poisonta 5y ago

I only like Clouflare as a security company.