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Vastly underrated cloud if you’re a small company and don’t operate containers is Cloudflare. I know they get criticized for other reasons but their DX is actua

Vastly underrated cloud if you’re a small company and don’t operate containers is Cloudflare. I know they get criticized for other reasons but their DX is actually really great if you’re tired of the big 3 (4?)

slig 2y ago
Can't wait to be able to run containers there. [1] [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/container-platform-preview/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/container-platform-preview/
- bithavoc 2y ago
  I can’t believe how unlucky Fly.io is. This is going to be the second time Cloudflare steals their lunch.
klabb3 2y ago
It’s a JavaScript/node-like environment only right now no? I love it for my svelte site but it’s a massive limitation to be locked in based on language and request-response based constraints right now. You need at the very least containers and persistent volumes to be interesting to me at least.
- hamandcheese 2y ago
  JS, TS, Python, and Rust are first class options, plus generic wasm: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/languages/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/languages/
  - re-thc 2y ago
    > and Rust are first class options, plus generic wasm Rust is still a wasm target. Not everything easily works. It doesn’t have all the Cloudflare sdk features js/ts has either.
    - kflansburg 2y ago
      All of the JS features are available in Rust, but some don’t have a first-class SDK API yet and you must use wasm-bindgen.
    - hamandcheese 2y ago
      I'm just using Cloudflare's own words.
  - mi_lk 2y ago
    Interesting choice to support Rust over Go if you ask me. Don't have numbers but I don't really peg Rust as a popular language for serverless web apps, certainly not to the extent of Go
    - watermelon0 2y ago
      Non-JS workers run via WASM, and Rust had WASM support before Go.
    - hamandcheese 2y ago
      I think GCd languages are not a great fit for WASM right now (though that is quickly changing).
  - pimeys 2y ago
    We ran our whole platform, written in Rust, in the Cloudflare Workers. It was not a great experience. You need to use their SDK, with really interesting bugs that never got fixed (we always forked a version). It was pretty hard to test anything locally, you just had to deploy your code to their platform, which took time and made the feedback loop to take so much time it blocked us from delivering features fast enough. And yes, you can test your local Rust code. It works nicely on your machine, but breaks with a really nasty error on their platform. The target is `wasm32-unknown-unknown`, which allows you to use `fetch` as your only source of IO. Ok, their workers has a hacky socket implementation nowadays. Non-standard of course. And most of the ecosystem won't work really without forking everything and fixing the bugs by yourself. We pivoted to a native Rust project. We still have one worker running in Cloudflare. We isolated that code from the workspace so that renovate updates will not touch it. You know, a random version upgrade might break the service...
maeil 2y ago
IME even a small company runs into something you need an actual server for, and then you're suddenly spread across two clouds because Cloudflare is serverless or nothing.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pm90 2y ago
  yeah i don’t understand why clouflare isn’t competing head on with cloud providers. Imo they should acquire fly.io, give them a blank check and 2 years and I think they can take down aws. The reason aws is dominant is because it’s the default and a known quantity. But developers and cost conscious organizations will look at alternatives. Not saying it would be easy but the prize would be huge. Plus AWS seems in chaos with a lack of sensible leadership.
  - maeil 2y ago
    Same, I see it as the single missing piece in the puzzle. If they had a VM product then for small businesses it'd be such an obvious choice, especially if they provide anywhere even just half the nice integration with their other products as they do with workers. I'm guessing it's just because they're so extremely all-in on every single of their products being on the edge, and you can't make that work with VMs without becoming far more expensive than any of their customers would pay. Or maybe I'm clueless. But it sure looks that way from the outside.
pier25 2y ago
I love Workers but they are not a panacea.
madjam002 2y ago
I moved off a fleet of VPSes onto Cloudflare Pages and subsequently back to VPSes again due to unpredictable latency, several cases of downtime in 12 months and weird bugs around static assets disappearing long before the advertised retention date for old deployments.

slig 2y ago

Can't wait to be able to run containers there. [1] [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/container-platform-preview/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/container-platform-preview/

bithavoc 2y ago
I can’t believe how unlucky Fly.io is. This is going to be the second time Cloudflare steals their lunch.

klabb3 2y ago

It’s a JavaScript/node-like environment only right now no? I love it for my svelte site but it’s a massive limitation to be locked in based on language and request-response based constraints right now. You need at the very least containers and persistent volumes to be interesting to me at least.

hamandcheese 2y ago
JS, TS, Python, and Rust are first class options, plus generic wasm: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/languages/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/languages/
- re-thc 2y ago
  > and Rust are first class options, plus generic wasm Rust is still a wasm target. Not everything easily works. It doesn’t have all the Cloudflare sdk features js/ts has either.
  - kflansburg 2y ago
    All of the JS features are available in Rust, but some don’t have a first-class SDK API yet and you must use wasm-bindgen.
  - hamandcheese 2y ago
    I'm just using Cloudflare's own words.
- mi_lk 2y ago
  Interesting choice to support Rust over Go if you ask me. Don't have numbers but I don't really peg Rust as a popular language for serverless web apps, certainly not to the extent of Go
  - watermelon0 2y ago
    Non-JS workers run via WASM, and Rust had WASM support before Go.
  - hamandcheese 2y ago
    I think GCd languages are not a great fit for WASM right now (though that is quickly changing).
- pimeys 2y ago
  We ran our whole platform, written in Rust, in the Cloudflare Workers. It was not a great experience. You need to use their SDK, with really interesting bugs that never got fixed (we always forked a version). It was pretty hard to test anything locally, you just had to deploy your code to their platform, which took time and made the feedback loop to take so much time it blocked us from delivering features fast enough. And yes, you can test your local Rust code. It works nicely on your machine, but breaks with a really nasty error on their platform. The target is `wasm32-unknown-unknown`, which allows you to use `fetch` as your only source of IO. Ok, their workers has a hacky socket implementation nowadays. Non-standard of course. And most of the ecosystem won't work really without forking everything and fixing the bugs by yourself. We pivoted to a native Rust project. We still have one worker running in Cloudflare. We isolated that code from the workspace so that renovate updates will not touch it. You know, a random version upgrade might break the service...

maeil 2y ago

IME even a small company runs into something you need an actual server for, and then you're suddenly spread across two clouds because Cloudflare is serverless or nothing.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pm90 2y ago
yeah i don’t understand why clouflare isn’t competing head on with cloud providers. Imo they should acquire fly.io, give them a blank check and 2 years and I think they can take down aws. The reason aws is dominant is because it’s the default and a known quantity. But developers and cost conscious organizations will look at alternatives. Not saying it would be easy but the prize would be huge. Plus AWS seems in chaos with a lack of sensible leadership.
- maeil 2y ago
  Same, I see it as the single missing piece in the puzzle. If they had a VM product then for small businesses it'd be such an obvious choice, especially if they provide anywhere even just half the nice integration with their other products as they do with workers. I'm guessing it's just because they're so extremely all-in on every single of their products being on the edge, and you can't make that work with VMs without becoming far more expensive than any of their customers would pay. Or maybe I'm clueless. But it sure looks that way from the outside.

pier25 2y ago

I love Workers but they are not a panacea.

madjam002 2y ago

I moved off a fleet of VPSes onto Cloudflare Pages and subsequently back to VPSes again due to unpredictable latency, several cases of downtime in 12 months and weird bugs around static assets disappearing long before the advertised retention date for old deployments.