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"The future of serverless is stateful" I'm a big fan of Cloudflare's openness, e.g., in supporting wasm in workers. But I wonder if building lock-in is really

by w10-1 3y ago

"The future of serverless is stateful" I'm a big fan of Cloudflare's openness, e.g., in supporting wasm in workers. But I wonder if building lock-in is really in their customers' interests - or theirs, if people lose faith in them. One of the value propositions for javascript+databases, and java before it, is that it was a programming model built in the open, and sometimes to standards that multiple vendors could supply. The openness of SQL has powered the industry, notwithstanding the manifold limitations and variants. A PartyKit integration is not particularly concerning if it's just niche gaming, but if real-time collaboration really does become trivial to implement at the same time AI spreads into all corners of content, it could become the dominant programming model for emerging tech at scale. AI seems to have ample competition, but I see little competition and many barriers to entry for this kind of programming model.

ayuhito 3y ago
> But I wonder if building lock-in is really in their customers' interests - or theirs, if people lose faith in them. People happily (or sometimes unhappily) lock themselves in with AWS since it’s convenient and useful. And that’s what Cloudflare is aiming to be in the serverless landscape even if it isn’t ideal.
- RowanH 3y ago
  I guess there's degrees of lock-in. I.e. using some parts of AWS you know push comes to shove you could write a different alternative/use a different library. It's a bunch of building blocks. There's various alternatives out there for components. Without reading too much of Partykit + Cloudflare, if you base your whole architecture on the way one company works and perhaps the pricing is too good to be true, you're setting yourself up for a rude shock in future. Everytime I've looked at Cloudflare's pricing I've gone "that's bonkers cheap" for what you're getting, which sets off alarm bells that once a PE company gets their hands on it, it's not going to be that cheap any more.
kentonv 3y ago
Standards bodies only standardize things after they've been proven to work. You can't standardize a new idea before offering it to the market. It's hard enough to get just one vendor to experiment with an idea (it literally took me years to convince everyone inside Cloudflare that we should build Durable Objects). Getting N competing vendors to agree on it -- before anything has been proven in the market -- is simply not possible. But the Durable Objects API is not complicated and there's nothing stopping competing platforms from building a compatible product if they want. Much of the implementation is open source, even. In fact, if you build an app on DO but decide you don't want to host it on Cloudflare, you can self-host it on workerd: https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

by w10-1 3y ago

ayuhito 3y ago

> But I wonder if building lock-in is really in their customers' interests - or theirs, if people lose faith in them. People happily (or sometimes unhappily) lock themselves in with AWS since it’s convenient and useful. And that’s what Cloudflare is aiming to be in the serverless landscape even if it isn’t ideal.

RowanH 3y ago
I guess there's degrees of lock-in. I.e. using some parts of AWS you know push comes to shove you could write a different alternative/use a different library. It's a bunch of building blocks. There's various alternatives out there for components. Without reading too much of Partykit + Cloudflare, if you base your whole architecture on the way one company works and perhaps the pricing is too good to be true, you're setting yourself up for a rude shock in future. Everytime I've looked at Cloudflare's pricing I've gone "that's bonkers cheap" for what you're getting, which sets off alarm bells that once a PE company gets their hands on it, it's not going to be that cheap any more.

kentonv 3y ago

Standards bodies only standardize things after they've been proven to work. You can't standardize a new idea before offering it to the market. It's hard enough to get just one vendor to experiment with an idea (it literally took me years to convince everyone inside Cloudflare that we should build Durable Objects). Getting N competing vendors to agree on it -- before anything has been proven in the market -- is simply not possible. But the Durable Objects API is not complicated and there's nothing stopping competing platforms from building a compatible product if they want. Much of the implementation is open source, even. In fact, if you build an app on DO but decide you don't want to host it on Cloudflare, you can self-host it on workerd: https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd