5 ms·
680 cores is peanuts. That is less than 10 modern specced compute servers. Its not nothing but you are probably talking about $20-30k/year in opex costs, which
by __turbobrew__ 2y ago
680 cores is peanuts. That is less than 10 modern specced compute servers. Its not nothing but you are probably talking about $20-30k/year in opex costs, which at the scale of cloudflare is probably a drop in the bucket.
Obviously it is an improvement but a lot of time there is lower hanging fruit, like the fact that the cloudflare control plane is/was not globally distributed and could not tolerate data center outages.
- FridgeSeal 2y agoIdk man, I’m not Cloudflare. That said: probably different teams with different priorities. I also disagree that “it’s _only_ $20-30k” as some kind of reason to not do this kind of work. Think of it another way: that’s now another 680 cores that can do _net more work_, that’s another 20-30k we don’t have to spend when traffic increases. “I landed a small PR that wiped $30k net off our costs” is a statement that would make a lot of people in a business pretty happy.
- __turbobrew__ 2y agoI work in a tech company which is a bit bigger than cloudflare and anything less than 6 figures/yr opex reduction is a rounding error. It is pretty regular to save the company 7 figures per year when opex is in the billions. It is about the opportunity cost, nobody is going to disagree that small optimizations are a net positive but what else could you have done with your time? Maybe cloudflare is at the point of maturity where there are no easy wins and only 1% gains left but I kind of doubt it given their reliability track record. How many dollars do they lose for every hour they are down? Probably more than $20k.
- cryptonym 2y agoMarketing content is more valuable than 680 cores. Let the guys have fun on developing tries, as long as they produce an article.