8 ms·

The realities of regions don’t go away. It’s a primitive to save you money. If a new entrant doesn’t have it they are either just operating in one region or you

The realities of regions don’t go away. It’s a primitive to save you money. If a new entrant doesn’t have it they are either just operating in one region or you’re paying cross-region prices for everything.

kkielhofner 3y ago
Cloudflare products and pricing (what I'm most familiar with) are in wild opposition to this view. I've never seen anything even remotely hinting at region or geography in their product line other than geo-routing for load balancing products, headers with geo info for you to do something with, etc. They include the serving "POP" in headers for diagnostic purposes but other than that you have no idea. Where do my Workers run? Don't know, don't care. They are substantially cheaper and offer better availability and response times than their region-based "cloud" competitors. Same for KV, D1, R2, and anything else they come up with as they move further and further in (out?). One would expect with them having the ability to allocate supporting hardware dynamically and globally their cost basis is substantially better than having customer facing and controlled region-based resources that still need to be built out for product support (regardless of usage) AND maintain the excess capacity local to each region to be anywhere near "elastic".
- grog454 3y ago
  > Where do my Workers run? Don't know, don't care Glad that works for you but for my game servers edge computing is not ideal and generally currently not even applicable.
  - SantaCruz11 3y ago
    Who do you use for game server edge computing? Edgegap?
- aeyes 3y ago
  Cloudflare also depends on investor money, they haven't made a profit ever and continue to just throw stuff at the wall to grow. At some point in time they'll have to start thinking about profitability.
  - short_sells_poo 3y ago
    It's important to qualify this though. E.g. Amazon was not profitable for a very long time, but only because they furiously reinvested everything. They could've turned profitable at any time. Assuming Cloudflare is a similar case to Amazon: ie they could turn profitable at any time but choose to reinvest those profits immediately into more business, that is a very good spot to be in.
    - applied_heat 3y ago
      Big assumption?
      - jamwil 3y ago
        Their financials are public.
        applied_heat 3y ago
        Ah! No need to make any assumptions then.
015a 3y ago
It really doesn't though. Sure, it would if the difference is only "16 mega-regions (regional-model) versus 300 mini-regions (edge)". But that's not the difference. The actual difference, at least how Cloudflare pushes it, is in the software; its a higher layer of abstraction; that customers get to stop thinking about regions and locations. Your software is global; its deployed everywhere; it runs everywhere. This is ENTIRELY antithetical to everything on AWS except CloudFront, Route53, IAM(ish), maybe a couple other minor services. Every Single Thing Every Single AWS Customer configures beyond those global services forces you into a region. Want to deploy a lambda function? Which region would you like? Pricing and available products is different in every region. Fronting it with an API? Where would you like that API Gateway? We'll put CloudFront in front of it so its a bit faster for ya, its global(ish), don't worry. In a no-true-scottsman true-edge world, this goes out the window. Cloudflare Workers is like this; D1 is kinda-ish-there-ish; R2 isn't. Here's the code; spider it across the world; automatically route clients to your closest PoP. No regions. No locations. Its not obvious that AWS will ever make meaningful moves to a world like this, for a ton of reasons, but most meaningfully: it requires customer demand; but AWS's existing customers aren't demanding it, because AWS's customers are old CTOs worried about past quarters too much to think about the next one. The younger, smarter, potential customers who recognize how valuable this is aren't AWS's customers; so AWS never hears from them (which, by the way, should more generally concern Amazon's investors; their "relentless customer driven" approach to their products is great for a few decades, but its absolutely true that most of the time customers just want a faster horse, and you're not hearing from the people who aren't your customers because you've never solved their problems before). So, Amazon has dumped billions upon billions into their couple-dozen giga-regions; you cannot pivot that into hundreds upon hundreds of mini-regions like what Cloudflare (and to a lesser but still awesome degree Fly) has. Vercel is the best case study on this. They are exploding in popularity. They don't run any of their own infra afaik, to be clear, but they whitelabel products from Cloudflare, Neon, and others; all Edge infra providers. No one on Vercel is cross-shopping AWS, and AWS has nothing that feels competitive to what Vercel offers. They can't compete. The outcome, in maybe 10-20 years, of this landscape feels really obvious right now, but AWS's size and the insane scale of their investment into "how we did things in 2010" will turn them into the next IBM. Some would say they already are. There's nothing they can do about it. They're not making the right investments. Even if they wanted to, they can't at the necessary scale, because what they're doing is working right now and their existing customers keep forcing them to spend more money building more structures, more racks, more blades, all in Ashburn VA.

kkielhofner 3y ago

Cloudflare products and pricing (what I'm most familiar with) are in wild opposition to this view. I've never seen anything even remotely hinting at region or geography in their product line other than geo-routing for load balancing products, headers with geo info for you to do something with, etc. They include the serving "POP" in headers for diagnostic purposes but other than that you have no idea. Where do my Workers run? Don't know, don't care. They are substantially cheaper and offer better availability and response times than their region-based "cloud" competitors. Same for KV, D1, R2, and anything else they come up with as they move further and further in (out?). One would expect with them having the ability to allocate supporting hardware dynamically and globally their cost basis is substantially better than having customer facing and controlled region-based resources that still need to be built out for product support (regardless of usage) AND maintain the excess capacity local to each region to be anywhere near "elastic".

grog454 3y ago
> Where do my Workers run? Don't know, don't care Glad that works for you but for my game servers edge computing is not ideal and generally currently not even applicable.
- SantaCruz11 3y ago
  Who do you use for game server edge computing? Edgegap?
aeyes 3y ago
Cloudflare also depends on investor money, they haven't made a profit ever and continue to just throw stuff at the wall to grow. At some point in time they'll have to start thinking about profitability.
- short_sells_poo 3y ago
  It's important to qualify this though. E.g. Amazon was not profitable for a very long time, but only because they furiously reinvested everything. They could've turned profitable at any time. Assuming Cloudflare is a similar case to Amazon: ie they could turn profitable at any time but choose to reinvest those profits immediately into more business, that is a very good spot to be in.
  - applied_heat 3y ago
    Big assumption?
    - jamwil 3y ago
      Their financials are public.
      - applied_heat 3y ago
        Ah! No need to make any assumptions then.

015a 3y ago

It really doesn't though. Sure, it would if the difference is only "16 mega-regions (regional-model) versus 300 mini-regions (edge)". But that's not the difference. The actual difference, at least how Cloudflare pushes it, is in the software; its a higher layer of abstraction; that customers get to stop thinking about regions and locations. Your software is global; its deployed everywhere; it runs everywhere. This is ENTIRELY antithetical to everything on AWS except CloudFront, Route53, IAM(ish), maybe a couple other minor services. Every Single Thing Every Single AWS Customer configures beyond those global services forces you into a region. Want to deploy a lambda function? Which region would you like? Pricing and available products is different in every region. Fronting it with an API? Where would you like that API Gateway? We'll put CloudFront in front of it so its a bit faster for ya, its global(ish), don't worry. In a no-true-scottsman true-edge world, this goes out the window. Cloudflare Workers is like this; D1 is kinda-ish-there-ish; R2 isn't. Here's the code; spider it across the world; automatically route clients to your closest PoP. No regions. No locations. Its not obvious that AWS will ever make meaningful moves to a world like this, for a ton of reasons, but most meaningfully: it requires customer demand; but AWS's existing customers aren't demanding it, because AWS's customers are old CTOs worried about past quarters too much to think about the next one. The younger, smarter, potential customers who recognize how valuable this is aren't AWS's customers; so AWS never hears from them (which, by the way, should more generally concern Amazon's investors; their "relentless customer driven" approach to their products is great for a few decades, but its absolutely true that most of the time customers just want a faster horse, and you're not hearing from the people who aren't your customers because you've never solved their problems before). So, Amazon has dumped billions upon billions into their couple-dozen giga-regions; you cannot pivot that into hundreds upon hundreds of mini-regions like what Cloudflare (and to a lesser but still awesome degree Fly) has. Vercel is the best case study on this. They are exploding in popularity. They don't run any of their own infra afaik, to be clear, but they whitelabel products from Cloudflare, Neon, and others; all Edge infra providers. No one on Vercel is cross-shopping AWS, and AWS has nothing that feels competitive to what Vercel offers. They can't compete. The outcome, in maybe 10-20 years, of this landscape feels really obvious right now, but AWS's size and the insane scale of their investment into "how we did things in 2010" will turn them into the next IBM. Some would say they already are. There's nothing they can do about it. They're not making the right investments. Even if they wanted to, they can't at the necessary scale, because what they're doing is working right now and their existing customers keep forcing them to spend more money building more structures, more racks, more blades, all in Ashburn VA.