[HN Gopher] Cloudflare on the edge
___________________________________________________________________
Cloudflare on the edge
Author : kaboro
Score : 165 points
Date : 2021-05-11 17:14 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| Animats wrote:
| _But given the nature of the internet, isn't that the whole
| problem? Because, anyone in Germany can go to any website outside
| of Germany._
|
| _That's the way it used to be, I'm not sure that's going to be
| the way it's going to be in the future._
|
| Uh oh. He might be right.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Their local governance situation is much easier because their
| platform only does like two and a half things.
|
| Once they add enough to become a full fledged cloud provider that
| an enterprise can lift and shift their SAP and Oracle bare metal
| servers and whatever else onto with guaranteed performance and
| availability SLAs, then they're in the same boat. Until they do
| that, they'll continue to be a niche player for things that fit
| those two and a half use cases. It's not like enterprises are
| going to rewrite all their enterprise apps around Workers.
|
| I think this is just a matter of people getting tired of the
| self-driving cars story, and a reach for some other reason to
| pump up share values.
| the_duke wrote:
| I recently tried out Workers.
|
| The tooling, documentation and language integration is rather
| awkward and cumbersome at the moment.
|
| Sparse documentation, language tooling that seems very half
| baked, workflows don't feel intuitive.
|
| But there is definitely potential.
| csomar wrote:
| There is lots of potential. I'm working on a startup idea
| around Cloudflare at the moment.
|
| Here is something that can help with Cloudflare horrible
| tooling: Use wasm/Rust. You'll be able to compile and run most
| of your code locally, and then when you deploy you have more
| odds of your code not bugging on the cloud.
| kylegill wrote:
| I had a similar experience. I tried installing some of their
| CLI tools and was met with some undocumented errors I didn't
| want to bother digging through code to figure out.
|
| > But there is definitely potential.
|
| I agree! It's something I'm watching with eager eyes, but don't
| feel like is the first option I'd turn to when making a
| technology choice.
|
| Another technology that gives me this feeling is FaunaDB [0].
|
| [0]: https://fauna.com/
| ignoramous wrote:
| The article doesn't talk about _Cloudflare One_ , but I think
| that is a bigger opportunity than Edge computing in the short
| term, given the rise in ransomware attacks targeting tech-naive
| institutions forced online due to the pandemic.
|
| Re: Edge: AWS has answers in Lambda at Edge (PoPs), Wavelength
| (5G Edge), and Local Zones (metro DCs); whilst Google has similar
| arrangements through its Anthos product line, if I'm not
| mistaken. Though, where Cloudflare shines is they architect their
| products to deploy and run from all locations around the world.
|
| Cloudflare also positions its ("global") products as being the
| simplest of all cloud providers to use. We stand to see how long
| they can remain as simple once they start ramping up on newer
| product lines and eventually _have_ to support different
| integration points among them.
|
| The article points out that Matthew Prince, being a HBS graduate,
| quotes Clayton Christensen in his TechCrunch Disrupt Q&A; and
| from what little I gather, Andy Jassy comes from the same school
| of thought, as well [0].
|
| I'm looking forward to more innovation from Cloudflare [1]. I've
| slowly moved all workloads that Cloudflare Edge could support out
| from AWS to it; only regret is AWS credits lay waste especially
| given we are pre-revenue. That said, Cloudflare's (limited)
| offerings are a better choice if you're a small engineering shop
| and couldn't be bothered with a gazillion bill items, IAM rules,
| and VPCs.
|
| [0] https://archive.is/tBpsj
|
| [1] ...and new-age cloud computing companies like railway.app,
| replit.com, darklang.com, stackpath.com, deno.land, vercel.com,
| fly.io to name a few.
| paulpauper wrote:
| i would not mind seeing cloudflare go away. havingto wait x
| second before viewing webpages or solving puzzles is annoying
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This is an unfortunate view, because Cloudflare is a better
| actor than most of their listed competitors. And the puzzles
| you are dealing with are merely settings that Cloudflare's
| customers have decided on, based on the assumption of risk
| based on how you choose to access the web.
|
| Instead of pitching a fit at Cloudflare, encourage and promote
| positive views of Tor-based browsing, privacy-respecting
| browser settings, etc. There's an unfortunate reality that
| people want those Cloudflare settings because they stop a lot
| of malicious traffic, while allowing the vast majority of
| legitimate traffic. As we move the window of legitimate traffic
| to be more privacy-respecting, you'll see the boundaries of
| such behaviors are forced to adjust.
| techsupporter wrote:
| > Instead of pitching a fit at Cloudflare, encourage and
| promote positive views of Tor-based browsing
|
| I don't know if the person to whom you are replying is using
| Tor, but I'm definitely not and I also despise how Cloudflare
| --or their customers, but I have no way of differentiating
| the two--reacts to various things.
|
| My home ISP is a very small outfit that mainly serves
| apartment buildings in my area. I don't know why, but every
| three or so weeks, Cloudflare decides that my ISP is a
| massive pile of risk and starts shunting almost every request
| I make through their "analysing your browser please be
| patient" screen. It's nothing specific to my computer because
| if I flip on a tunnel through my server in a colocation
| service in the same city as me, I get zero prompts.
|
| I've worked with my ISP and they've basically given me free
| reign to assign myself whatever public IP I want out of their
| /22 (as long as it's not in use by another customer, of
| course) and, during these times, any IP I choose gets the
| same response from Cloudflare.
|
| It's the same lack of transparency and being able to say
| "hey, what gives" that applies to spam filtering by the big
| e-mail providers or getting dropped into the "scam likely"
| bucket for mobile phone calls. I understand the need to
| filter and screen and protect but that doesn't mean I have to
| like it when it splashes onto me.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I am not with Cloudflare, but I'd guess something about
| traffic from your ISP is causing Cloudflare to be
| uncomfortable with it. Presumably your ISP could discuss it
| with Cloudflare?
| techsupporter wrote:
| They claim that they have done so, and that they can't
| locate any suspicious traffic coming from their network.
| Of course, these claims might be BS and I've no way to
| prove or disprove it...
| thefreeman wrote:
| Is it really that complicated? Someone else on your ISP is
| almost definitely sending abusive traffic and it gets your
| ISP greylisted. Instead of blaming cloudflare you could
| instead get your ISP to proactively block / ban abusers.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Do you think the average user is going to 1) Know that
| this is what is happening and 2) Have their ISP listen to
| them?
| wmf wrote:
| Users don't need to be in the loop here. ISPs should
| monitor their reputation (e.g. by using their own
| service) and fix it without being nagged.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| How do you monitor this in a privacy-respecting manner?
| Frankly, with HTTPS, how do you monitor this even at all?
| There's no way as an ISP to tell benign from malicious
| HTTPS traffic?
|
| Does Cloudflare provide something to say "Is my IP
| considered malicious?" and a way to ask/appeal about any
| bans?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Should, sure. But that doesn't help their customers who
| often have no choice for their ISP.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| > I've worked with my ISP and they've basically given me
| free reign to assign myself whatever public IP I want out
| of their /22
|
| This.
|
| If your ISP isn't keeping track of which customer is using
| which IP addresses and handling complaints sent to their
| abuse@ etc, then their /22 is likely to have poor
| reputation.
| moshmosh wrote:
| Bingo, same thing caught my eye. "You're saying that when
| you asked them to do something a spammer or criminal
| might want to do, they just let you? And you say their IP
| block has a bad reputation? Yes, quite a mystery."
|
| [EDIT] though I'm not disputing that it would feel shitty
| and unfair, for a normal user, to be stuck dealing with
| CAPTCHAs because of that.
| techsupporter wrote:
| > If your ISP isn't keeping track of which customer is
| using which IP addresses and handling complaints sent to
| their abuse
|
| To be clear, I am the only person (so far as I know) who
| has the ability to do this. Subscribers are ordinarily
| segmented by VLAN and the DHCP server hands out a single,
| predefined IP address on a /30. If a subscriber moves
| between apartments, their IP goes with them (the VLAN is
| simply relocated to the new physical port in the new
| apartment). Which customer has which IP in which
| apartment is all documented in their customer management
| system.
|
| What they've permitted me to do, as part of testing, is
| to manually assign myself an IP by removing the VLAN and
| DHCP restriction on my specific port. If I try to this
| same stunt in a friend's apartment, on the same ISP, it
| does not work.
| jleahy wrote:
| Out of interest, does that mean they are using 4 IPs per
| customer? If they're handing out one /30 per customer.
| devit wrote:
| Because Cloudflare for no clear reason allows them to require
| captchas for pages that are cached anyway and thus where DoS
| is not a problem, and also in cases where the website is not
| actively being DoSed at that moment.
|
| [of course captchas do nothing against targeted attacks]
| casefields wrote:
| Time flies and we are all here for only so long. Yet,
| cloudflare thinks taking "up to 5 seconds" of my life is
| completely fine. It's a damn time vampire.
|
| _As long as we suck it slowly, they won 't notice!_
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Does that happen to you often?
|
| This only happens to me very occasionally (say, a couple times
| a year tops)
|
| As a developer, I love their products.
| harporoeder wrote:
| Consider trying out PrivacyPass (1) which does some fancy
| cryptography to limit the number of captchas you have to do
| while preserving privacy. Unfortunately there does not seem to
| be any ideal solution for dealing with the legions of bots on
| the web.
|
| 1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-
| pass...
| johnklos wrote:
| The article neatly ignores the reality that Cloudflare is a
| shitty company that wants to lock everyone possible in as much as
| possible, that wants to re-centralize the Internet, that wants to
| become a monopoly.
|
| For every product or service they create, ask yourself this: if
| taken to the logical conclusion where a majority of people use
| Cloudflare, do their products help the world, or do their
| products help them? Do they help the world to their detriment, or
| do they help Cloudflare to the detriment of the world?
|
| Anyone except fanbois will realize that re-centralization will
| only hurt the world and will only help Cloudflare, no matter
| which service or product it is.
|
| They're a shitty company with shitty, dishonest, disingenuous
| people who spout bullshit and make money off of scammers and
| spammers. I don't think that's going to change any time soon.
|
| I, for one, am tired of seeing constant Cloudflare propaganda and
| masturbation on this site.
| threeseed wrote:
| I use to be one of those fanboys until I used their product.
|
| They have quite a few dodgy subscription traps and a firm "no-
| refund under any circumstances" policy even when mistakes were
| on their end.
|
| I have constantly had to initiate chargebacks in order to do
| business with them and can't switch since in our case have no
| competitors.
| yannoninator wrote:
| Do you have an alternative to Cloudflare if they are that bad?
| johnklos wrote:
| How about NOT Cloudflare? You ask as if they provide services
| that can't be found elsewhere.
| wmf wrote:
| Boycotting centralized stuff because it's more efficient isn't
| going to work, so if you want to avoid the Cloudflarepocalypse
| you need to work on making decentralized systems competitive.
| dreyfan wrote:
| Yeah, but it's still a rather awesome product offering. I wish
| the US government would put as much effort into mass transit as
| they have with project Cloudflare.
| kokanee wrote:
| Amazon and Google own about half of the market. To criticize
| Cloudflare for re-centralization would require that we are
| decentralized in the first place.
|
| Personally, my experience with Cloudflare's edge products so
| far has been amazing. I've had a free CDN with free SSL certs
| on every website I've made for the last 5 years. When I started
| using Workers I hit a mildly troublesome scenario so I opened a
| PR and they quickly thanked me and merged it. The usage limits
| for only $5/mo are genuinely unparalleled; they have by far the
| lowest and most transparent pricing of any similar service, at
| least for my use cases.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Delivering sites faster to users seems to help the world.
|
| Reducing bandwidth costs and increase site speed seems to be
| helpful for their direct customers.
|
| Your conclusion only seems to follow if you firmly believe that
| (internet) centralization is always bad. That's a nuanced
| topic, but by no means does everyone agree with it.
|
| (Also, your last 3 sentences are very ranty and don't add to
| the conversation - are you doing ok today?)
| johnklos wrote:
| Seriously? So the idea that they provide some good outweighs
| their history of shitty behavior and their desire to re-
| centralize and become a monopoly?
|
| If what I wrote seems ranty, it might be because you haven't
| heard of their shitty behavior. Here's something I wrote, but
| I'm certainly not alone in not being happy with what
| Cloudflare tries to do:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/ldvzih/do_you_k.
| ..
| edmundsauto wrote:
| My point was to inject some nuance so we could discuss the
| tradeoffs, rather than your one-sided comment that is a
| conversation ender. At no point did I attempt to balance
| the scales to reduce the situation to a good/bad emotional
| response. It appears that _is_ your objective, which isn 't
| a very interesting way to spend time. Have a nice day.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| The quotes at the end are excellent, they emphasize that your
| Microsofts and Googles of the world are going to try to throw
| their weight around to force the Internet to work the way works
| best for their business, rather than accepting a political
| reality, that the Internet is a communications medium, and laws
| are going to affect it differently in different countries, just
| as they do today for phone, mail, and any other medium.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| Bigger companies are more compliant to the local laws than
| smaller companies. Simply because they have more to lose if the
| local government turns against them, they tread more carefully.
| Small companies can afford to fly under the radar just because
| they are small and likely catering to the fringe users and not
| to the masses.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| > Bigger companies are more compliant to the local laws than
| smaller companies.
|
| Sort of, but partly because those bigger companies are often
| the ones _writing_ the laws. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.
| operate "public policy teams", whose goal is to push
| legislators to enshrine their business practices as law.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| That may indeed be a factor, but it can happen even without
| active lobbying on the part of big business--all they need
| to do is sit back and let things flow. Be it in good faith
| or for cynical electioneering, lawmakers will introduce new
| regulatory requirements under the argument that they better
| protect the consumer or encourage a more competitive
| marketplace. However, the more complex these become, and
| the faster they change, the more it helps big business for
| they are the ones who can afford the legal teams and
| resources to keep track of them.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm nowhere near an economic _laissez-
| fair_ libertarian, and I believe that strong regulation is
| necessary in many markets and industries. However, I 'm
| also very wary of well-meaning but overly complex rules
| which do little but add a huge barrier to competition
| against the big players.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This is trivial to fix: A lot of regulatory requirements
| should have a minimum size before they take effect. Such
| that a small player is approaching large player status
| before they need to worry about it.
| svara wrote:
| I don't quite understand the point that latency doesn't matter
| much outside of niche applications.
|
| If you're using TCP, bandwidth depends on latency, and surely no
| one thinks bandwidth isn't important? This totally does matter in
| the hundreds-of-milliseconds range, you can use one of the online
| calculators to confirm this.
|
| The other thing is that live video/audio isn't niche at all.
| Cloudflare could prioritize latency-sensitive traffic like that
| within its network, and deliver it as close to the users as
| possible on their respective ends.
|
| Am I missing something?
| seangrogg wrote:
| While you're correct to think that latency does indeed matter,
| I think what the article is trying to point out is that very
| few services are latency sensitive _beyond what is
| traditionally expected_.
|
| In many applications, there are certain expectations of
| performance around certain actions, sure. That said, if things
| go long the user may get _annoyed_ but they won 't be
| _deterred_. But in some cases, having anything but the highest
| regard for latency is not only a deterrence, it 's basically
| completely unacceptable to the user.
|
| Sure, you want your blog to load fast. But if your blog takes
| 300ms or 900ms very few people are going to notice the
| difference despite the 3x disparity. You're unlikely to get a
| nastygram on Twitter about your blog being unusable. Hell, even
| websites that take greater-than-one seconds to load are
| routinely not taken to task by the average user because, quite
| frankly, while fast is nice it's not a _need_.
|
| But apply that to a competitive, real-time game and if your
| service takes 70ms RTT for one of the roughly several hundreds
| of thousands of commands issued to it over the course of a 20
| minute span you're performing about average. At 250ms -
| dramatically less than the kind of latency bound available to a
| blog post - you're rapidly approaching "completely unplayable"
| and going to get nasty responses.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Over 10 years ago:
|
| Panelist: "Would your vision eventually, this disruption, take
| over internal teams working on these problems."
|
| CEO: "Our vision is we're going to power the Internet. [Dead
| serious face and stare]."
|
| Video in the article. Amazing vision and execution.
| nojito wrote:
| Also a tremendously obvious case of hindsight bias in action.
|
| Shows the immaturity in the analysis of stratechery in my
| opinion.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Ha, hard to please! I guess building and executing a billion
| dollar company on those exact words isn't enough for you.
|
| I agree the journey probably wasn't as 0 or 1 as my comment
| makes it seem.
|
| But in all seriousness, it's okay to relax a little, not to
| be negative, and concede some things to be inspired.
| eastdakota wrote:
| I think I was pretty cocky.
|
| :-p
|
| But it really was how we thought about what we were doing from
| day one. Our litmus test was always: "If we ran the Internet,
| would this be the right decision?" Asked that for every
| technical, business, and policy/legal question we faced. Seemed
| absurd when it was 8 of us over a nail salon in Palo Alto, but
| led to a lot of good decisions and long-term thinking.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I've been using Cloudflare for many many years now, I like it
| a lot. I like that I mostly set it up once and forgot about
| it.
|
| I just found about Durable Objects and can't wait to try them
| on a new project for a client that has a use case like: few
| days per year has a huge traffic spike (tens of thousands
| concurrent users) while the rest of the year is pretty much
| dead. I think DOs could be a perfect fit for this.
|
| Cheers and let's hope for another 10 great years, :D.
| underseacables wrote:
| Cloudflare slipped too far into censorship to support them any
| further. I used to promote their service to customers but no
| longer. The last thing I want to power the Internet is a
| persobality driven agenda for censorship.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I would say despite feeling a bit of sadness that deplatforming
| is the thing that it is today, that it's hard to really blame
| any company for it these days.
|
| We are in a hyper-political environment, where your company is
| going to be judged by one group or another for any action _or
| inaction_. So if you 're protecting far right nuts, your left
| side is going to drop you. In a very real sense, protecting
| 8chan or Daily Stormer is a company deciding to solely make
| itself palatable to supporters of those sites, at the expense
| of basically... all your other customers.
|
| No company that wants to be successful is going to stand in
| defense of a customer or two that's known as a source of
| terrorism and violence.
| ksec wrote:
| Cloudflare is the only Internet companies that actually talks
| about Rule of Law in way Freedom of Speech and politics should
| be played, rather than some arbitrary company TOS.
|
| Given that Prince studied law in Harvard he is way more
| knowledgeable and aware than average CEO.
| eloff wrote:
| You mean when they terminated service to the daily stormer or
| 8chan?
|
| I don't like censorship, but I have a hard time criticizing
| those actions.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Ah, but they did it while still supporting ISIS sites. With
| the loving slow-motion execution of infidels.
|
| On one hand, cartoon frogs. On the other hand, real human
| beings with det-cord wrapped around their necks waiting for
| actual death, their heads popping off like soda bottle tops.
|
| It's all about the priorities.
| nindalf wrote:
| > On one hand, cartoon frogs
|
| Is this an honest, good faith explanation of everything
| that was discussed on the Daily Stormer and 8chan?
| at_a_remove wrote:
| It's at least as honest as leaving out the ISIS stuff.
| Which, you know, sins of omission and all.
| ljhsiung wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what is your opinion on companies that
| created the infrastructure to support Nazi Germany/build camps?
|
| IBM, VW, Deutsche Bank, etc.
| yuy910616 wrote:
| Ford. Let's not forget Ford himself got an medal from Nazi
| Germany
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| This is getting way off-topic and not to pile on but you
| know who designed those handsome SS uniforms? Hugo Boss.
| mellosouls wrote:
| I'm very much against the big tech (Twitter, Facebook, Google
| et al) suppression of/bias against pro-Trump and other
| conservative voices, but Cloudflare seems pretty good on that
| front comparatively - 8Chan and StormFront were booted (good!)
| but Gab and Parler etc were allowed despite heavy pressure from
| the usual suspects, which seems like quite a brave move in
| these self-righteous McCarthyite times.
|
| Who are you thinking of when you talk about censorship?
| brightball wrote:
| When did Cloudflare slip into censorship?
| hackcasual wrote:
| Maybe they mean this? https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-
| terminated-daily-stormer/
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| They probably mean 8chan rather than this.
| hackcasual wrote:
| Ah yes, the platform for mass shooters
| fossuser wrote:
| > "And you can manage that okay. You can manage on a per country
| basis. You feel good about that?
|
| > "Sure. I mean, for us, that's easy. And then we can provide
| that to our customers as a function of what we're doing. But I
| think that if you could say, German rules don't extend beyond
| Germany and French rules don't extend beyond France and Chinese
| rules don't extend beyond China and that you have some human
| rights floor that's in there."
|
| I'd be curious about that human rights floor. It's one thing to
| follow laws in a western democratic country with elections and
| rule of law, but it's another to do so in countries without
| elected governments or rule of law. It sounds like they're
| thinking about this since he explicitly mentioned the human
| rights floor, so that's good at least.
|
| > "Right. But given the nature of the internet, isn't that the
| whole problem? Because, anyone in Germany can go to any website
| outside of Germany.
|
| > "That's the way it used to be, I'm not sure that's going to be
| the way it's going to be in the future."
|
| This makes me sad, I hope we don't end up in a highly
| nationalized intranet style future but it does seem like things
| are trending that way (unfortunately).
| paxys wrote:
| That last bit about politics/laws is exactly where I fear the
| internet will be a decade or two from now. Virtual borders will
| be controlled by nations as strictly as physical ones. Every byte
| going in or out will be monitored and regulated. "Removing [xyz]
| from the internet" will be a matter of a government clicking a
| button rather than the laughable scenario it is today. And they
| will be assisted every step of the way by companies like
| Cloudflare, Amazon and Microsoft.
| zsims wrote:
| Isn't this expected? The "real world" is heavily regulated but
| the internet is open and free (not always in a good way).
|
| It makes it really difficult to deal with crime, cyber warfare,
| and illicit content. We need "something."
| judge2020 wrote:
| I think people have enjoyed the Wild West of the Internet
| long enough for governments to want to put a stop to it
| proactively instead of retroactively, although I don't think
| it necessarily should be done.
| busymom0 wrote:
| It would be a sad day when that happens. Internet still allows
| an ability for whistleblowers from ole country to be able to
| reach out to others. If virtual borders start getting enforced
| even harder than what we already have, those whistleblowers
| will be forever silenced.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| I'm a little more optimistic in that I think decentralized
| networks will disrupt all these centralized monopolies (ex:
| imagine a social network where you own your data and can access
| it through various frontends, rather than one company owning it
| all). Hopefully, all the rewards will also get re-distributed
| back to participants in the network rather than one entity.
|
| People are starting to realize what happens when a central
| entity can just "cancel" you and as that keeps happening more
| often (ex: youtubers getting de-monetized, people getting
| locked out of their google accounts, Trump twitter
| cancellation, etc), people will be pushed to these un-
| censorable decentralized alternatives.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > He said running a company is a bit like flying an airplane. You
| want to make sure it's well maintained at all times. And that
| when you're flying, you keep the wheel steady and the nose 10
| degrees about the horizon.
|
| Yup, VC b.s. spotted.
|
| (You don't cruise with the nose 10 degrees above the horizon.)
| Budabellly wrote:
| Good article, I feel people don't spend a lot of time thinking
| about this stuff.
|
| The gap here for me is that AWS, GCP, and the like are perfectly
| equipped to build infra "from the edge in" as well. It's just not
| an advantage for Cloudflare -- I'd actually argue that AWS has
| the comparative advantage in building "from the edge in" given
| the clip at which they can turn out datacenters.
|
| With the new Outpost model as well, I don't see too many hurdles
| for AWS to just start deploying their whole feature set in any
| old colo, in any old country, in a matter of months. They do have
| to set their minds to it though. At the very least, they should
| definitely have their storage services in every country with
| actual data locality laws.
|
| I'm sure I'm missing something, but on the infra side I don't see
| what Cloudflare is better at in this regard. I'd also argue that
| AWS storage migration is just as good or better than Cloudflare's
| offering here. I won't comment on how users perceive/value each
| service because I don't use either much.
|
| What I definitely DO agree with, is that infra "from the edge in"
| is a major threat to existing public cloud business models. At
| the point where you have your whole stack portable from colo to
| colo (or, gasp, as a dAPP), it starts to sound more like public
| cloud as a library, rather than as a centralized managed service.
|
| Open source communities, unbundlers, and new-age cloud companies
| together will have a field day building 'library' versions of
| common cloud services and I think Cloudflare will pair nicely at
| that point. The question is when that becomes a reality.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| > The gap here for me is that AWS, GCP, and the like are
| perfectly equipped to build infra "from the edge in" as well.
| It's just not an advantage for Cloudflare -- I'd actually argue
| that AWS has the comparative advantage in building "from the
| edge in" given the clip at which they can turn out datacenters.
|
| You're clearly more versed with AWS than I am but I think that
| if you compare them at this level, you could argue that all the
| big cloud providers could easily compete with Cloudflare and
| crowd out their proposition.
|
| But this possibly overlooks the (in my view) very unique
| execution style of a Cloudflare compared to "Big Cloud".
|
| I do worry about their ever growing reach across vast portions
| of the internet, but, I keep coming back to Cloudflare and
| taking up more of their feature set because they make me so
| damn productive, and unlike all the other cloud providers, the
| learning curve is very minimal and their products are a
| pleasure to use.
|
| I have huge respect for AWS and Azure, and use them both for
| production workloads where needed, but I'm weary of their
| complexity and bloat. Cloudflare is an absolute breath of fresh
| air in comparison.
|
| My only criticism of CF's execution is that it can seem a bit
| "scatter gun" sometimes. Eg Cloudflare Registrar still doesn't
| support .co.uk domains years after its launch - which complete
| undermines that offering. They sometimes launch things and then
| seem to neglect them and start working on something else.
|
| The one thing I really wish they would turn their creative
| minds to is reinventing the whole CAPTCHA concept. Given their
| reliance on captcha and what an utterly fucking awful
| experience it is to try and identify all the buses in 9 grainy
| low res photos, I think it's about time CF invented something
| better.
| daxfohl wrote:
| An outpost/local_zone still has to have a home region that
| serves as the primary control plane IIUC, so I don't think that
| would be applicable here.
|
| (That said, I think given their experience deploying to China,
| meeting GDPR, etc, and their focus on whatever it takes to make
| money, AWS and others should have no problem figuring out a
| solution to local regulations if that's what it ends up coming
| down to. That's _far_ more likely than enterprises deciding to
| restructure everything they do around Cloudflare Workers, or
| Cloudflare becoming a full cloud platform.)
| [deleted]
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