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Classic Cloudflare, for all, works well, not too expensive... but, and consequently of all those positive attributes, positioning itself at the center of everyt
by utopiah 4mo ago
Classic Cloudflare, for all, works well, not too expensive... but, and consequently of all those positive attributes, positioning itself at the center of everything.
- swyx 4mo agoi mean. fair trade?
- utopiah 4mo agoIt's a good move for them but it's problematic for anybody who cares about a decentralized Internet.
- vachina 4mo agoMy policy has been, I make sure I have an equivalent self hosted solution that I can immediately switch to, before deploying said feature to Cloudflare. That said I only use cloudflare for piping and none of the compute stuff.
- utopiah 4mo agoIndeed, a self-hosted compatible fallback is a great failsafe.
- enraged_camel 4mo agoI hate to say it, but I think the ship of decentralized Internet sailed a long time ago, and it's not coming back.
- shimman 4mo agoNo, consolidation within the tech industry has never been good for workers or open source development. For someone who considers themselves as part of the open source community I've been extremely disappointed how anti-worker and pro-corporation you come across. Don't worry you aren't unique in this regard, many other nonworking dev influencers say similar things: never championing for workers but somehow always championing positions that help investors + corporations first and foremost
- nomel 4mo ago> has never been good for workers Having your workers in-house whole other businesses/industries is also not good for workers, because the problem space of that grants their actual employment won't get the required attention.
- swyx 4mo agoi have insufficient energy to productively disagree but defend your right to be wrong
- breakingcups 4mo agoCloudflare is one of the most expensive providers out there once you step out of the basics. Look at their video streaming.
- SCLeo 4mo agoI cannot agree more. Cloudflare has some services that are really cheap (r2) to lure you into their worker "ecosystem", which is just serverless. Once you are vendor locked into their absolute garbage custom JavaScript runtime, you are pretty much forced to use their distributed database Cloudflare KV if you want good performance. Cloudflare KV is so extremely ridiculously absurdly expensive that make predatory pricing of vercel that HN likes to complain about feel like child play.
- kentonv 4mo agoOh no... KV is not a distributed database and is really not intended as a database alternative at all. It's more meant for distributing bits of config globally. Cost aside, writes are way too slow for database-ish use and "eventually consistent" isn't what you want for state that is changing often. Durable Objects (SQLite) or Hyperdrive (edge caching in front of a normal postgres/mysql database) are what you want, and will probably be a lot cheaper. Sorry for the confusion.
- nijave 4mo agoMaybe it depends on product offering. WAF + CDN was competitive with Akamai (through a VAR) and AWS and came with free Zero Trust seats. Iirc Argo and some other routing products are quite expensive.
- nekitamo 4mo agoI don't think that's necessarily true. Certainly the video streaming is expensive, but other things like workers and KV store are quite cheap and performant and powerful _if you structure your access patterns accordingly_ . Cloudflare pricing introduces an additional dimension for when you're architecting software on top of them, but if you do it correctly, your product has the potential to be faster, cheaper, and easier to run than traditional solutions running on multiple geographically distributed VMs. You just can't approach them as if they're just another VM instance provider and expect a similar experience and pricing. What they do and price for is fundamentally different from that.