[HN Gopher] Cloudflare's Disruption
___________________________________________________________________
Cloudflare's Disruption
Author : oedmarap
Score : 538 points
Date : 2021-09-30 15:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| tyingq wrote:
| It feels like if they released a serverless/Lambda equivalent
| they would start taking a lot of business from the big 3. Workers
| are somewhat close, but the v8/isolate pattern limits them to
| narrower use cases. A more traditional serverless that could sit
| at the center and be optionally fronted by Workers would be nice.
| gervwyk wrote:
| 100% agree with this. Running docker images on serverless is
| really great and allows you to deploy your environment to any
| provider with minimal effort. would be cool if they can add
| something like this, even if it does not provide 0s startup
| time..
| mwcampbell wrote:
| To me, that's like saying that web browsers should be able to
| run existing native applications, so we can lift and shift more
| existing code. But just as JavaScript-based web applications
| enabled frictionless code distribution on the client side,
| JavaScript-based Cloudflare Workers is doing the same on the
| server side. Sometimes progress requires breaking backward
| compatibility, and I think this is one of those cases. And I'm
| confident that there will be other runtime environments that
| emulate Cloudflare Workers, mitigating the risk of vendor lock-
| in.
| tyingq wrote:
| I'm skeptical that JavaScript and WASM are anywhere near
| being suitable for any and all backend services.
|
| For example, Cloudflare workers can't even talk to the
| outside world with anything other than fetch(). There's
| websockets, but only as a pair to talk to a browser that
| connected to you.
|
| I'm a fan of Workers, but they do have limitations.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Likewise, there was a time when microcomputers weren't
| suitable for many applications. Sometimes a new approach
| (edit: and ultimately a better one) has to start at the low
| end and work its way up.
| cholmon wrote:
| Cloudflare acquiring fly.io would be interesting to see.
| brightball wrote:
| Cloudflare acquiring Lumen and Fly would be interesting to
| see.
|
| All of Lumen's value is in the nationwide backbone fiber
| although they are trying to make a play in edge computing.
| IMO those fiber assets in the hands of a company like CF
| combined with a service like Fly would be pretty incredible.
| toastal wrote:
| You prefer monopoly?
| phn wrote:
| I'd bet more on them using their internal stack/expertise
| from building workers.
| natrys wrote:
| While this doesn't preclude your scenario, note that
| cloudflare acquired appfleet recently, which was a similar
| service:
|
| https://appfleet.com/pricing
|
| https://appfleet.com/blog/appfleet-joins-cloudflare/
| rattray wrote:
| As I was reading this article, I thought to myself, oh, this
| is the acquirer fly.io has in mind...
| mrkurt wrote:
| I think we're a year ahead of Cloud Flare on learning but
| we do not want to be acquired. They also don't like us
| much.
| gingerlime wrote:
| when can we see some real competition with CF? as in
| offering a modular CDN, WAF, etc? Your build-your-CDN
| blog post left me hoping you'll build one for us :)
| mrkurt wrote:
| I think we'll solve some of this, most people who want a
| WAF just want to check a box. It makes sense to sell them
| a WAF. It's not where we're most valuable, though, our
| customers are pushing us towards much more interesting
| infrastructure. :)
| rattray wrote:
| > They also don't like us much
|
| Huh, that's too bad! Meaning they've caused trouble for
| your customers? Definitely disappointing to hear...
| mrkurt wrote:
| Oh no. I don't want to imply anything nefarious. I think
| we've just been irritating.
| rhizome wrote:
| That's what they all say.
| mrkurt wrote:
| Sometimes it's a negotiation stance. Sometimes it just
| means "getting acquired sucks and we would rather do our
| own thing in the way that we think is best". Like this
| time!
| [deleted]
| boynamedsue wrote:
| A big turn off for me is wanting to use Python on Cloudflare
| Workers and then reading that it needs to compile to
| JavaScript.
|
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/languages
| mdasen wrote:
| I definitely understand that Cloudflare Workers are likely to
| be unsatisfying as a Lambda replacement for people who want
| to use a language like Python.
|
| I think there is a decent reason why Cloudflare, at least
| initially, went the route that it did. V8 Isolates allow them
| to run code from many different people without many of the
| cold-start, memory, and performance issues of offering a more
| full environment. V8 Isolates allow them to be a lot more
| efficient than something like Lambda. It does come with the
| cost of being more limited for things like language support.
|
| I think it's a pretty good bet. Lots of people are
| comfortable with JavaScript/TypeScript (even if you or I
| don't love it) and WebAssembly is likely to become a decently
| supported compilation target over the next 5 years from a lot
| more languages. Microsoft has done a lot for C#/.NET support
| of WebAssembly and it should be quite good with .NET 6 coming
| in 2 months. Python, Go, and many other languages have at
| least some support for WebAssembly and it seems like that
| will only get better over time.
|
| I definitely understand it being a turn-off. If you haven't
| read their post introducing them, I'd read it:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-
| containe.... It doesn't solve your problem, but I think it's
| a good read on why they made that trade-off.
| boynamedsue wrote:
| Good explanation! Helped my understanding of their choices.
| :)
| busymom0 wrote:
| The post right about this post on HN's front page is titled
| "Slack is experiencing a service disruption". So for a second I
| thought CF was having some disruption (outage) which caused Slack
| to go down.
| stevebmark wrote:
| In 2017 Cloudflare had an HTML parser bug that caused encrypted
| HTTP traffic to be leaked. Any website served by Cloudflare was
| vulnerable to having all of its traffic leaked into the HTML body
| response of the website that Cloudflare proxied. Given that
| Cloudflare is the proxy service for 80% of websites that use
| proxies, this affected a significant portion of the internet.
|
| Cloudflare served private HTTP traffic in response bodies,
| meaning that website results contained cookies, session data,
| encrypted traffic, all personally identifiable, and because it
| was served as response bodies, it was *indexed by search
| engines*, not to mention anyone else who was scraping websites
| during the time of the incident. It included credit card
| information, frames from videos, PII, the works, all linked to
| individual users.
|
| This was ongoing for *months.*
|
| Anyone savvy could use this information to hijack accounts,
| scrape personal information, view private browsing habits. Even
| when Cloudflare publicly announced it (and tried to blame others)
| when they thought they had cleaned up most of the data, you could
| still easily use search engines to find people's personal
| information by searching for the Cloudflare header strings that
| started the leaked session information.
|
| Many countries have legal policies around data breaches,
| including required disclosure policies and penalties. In the
| greatest blind eye turn of the history of the internet,
| Cloudflare managed to get away with a single blog post, and no
| other penalties. https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-
| memory-leak-c...
|
| THAT is Cloudflare's disruption.
| lelandfe wrote:
| More reading from HN at the time, it wound up getting called
| "Cloudbleed"[0]:
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13766339
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718720
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729517
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13721452
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed
| 72f988bf wrote:
| > S3's margin is R2's opportunity
|
| Indeed, it looks like "your margin is my opportunity" motto can
| work both ways for Amazon :)
| manquer wrote:
| Well customers and users eventually benefit.
| janandonly wrote:
| After reading this I felt the urge to buy Cloudflare stocks...
| anyone else as well?
| wp381640 wrote:
| I was at the TC conference - wanted to buy the stock then!
|
| Have bought since the IPO and am super bullish. It seems most
| Wall St analysts really don't understand the company or
| business.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I wouldn't buy at this price personally. I got in at $15 and
| again at $60, average price ~40. I might buy more if they dip
| under $100 though.
| zz865 wrote:
| They're a progressive company, but price wars are generally not
| a profitable place to be.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Disruption happens at the low-end of the market, by
| definition.
| [deleted]
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| I regret not investing back when durable objects was announced.
| From a technical perspective, it's a very unique capability.
|
| I had a similar experience with Shopify. I had interactions
| with them in a company I worked at back in 2015 and regarded
| them very highly among the e-commerce platforms but didn't buy
| the stock...
| linuxftw wrote:
| Same. I'm already long since shortly after the IPO, obviously I
| wish I invested much more. The passage about fixed bandwidth
| costs due to relationships with ISPs really resonated with me.
|
| Wish I worked for them and was getting those sweet, sweet RSUs.
| eastdakota wrote:
| https://cloudflare.com/careers
| Wintereise wrote:
| Is CF open to hiring remotely, or are you guys only open to
| considering onsite applications?
| prdonahue wrote:
| We're hiring remotely for most roles these days, so long
| as you reside in a country where we're set up to hire
| people (tax presence, etc.).
| rvz wrote:
| Gave that buy signal years ago since they released their S-1.
| [0] A train ride that is 500% up from the IPO price.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306
| jerf wrote:
| "More importantly, AWS itself is locked-in to its integrated
| approach: the entire service is architected both technically and
| economically to be an all-encompassing offering; to modularize
| itself in response to Cloudflare would be suicidal."
|
| Eh, somewhat. AWS is already modular in a lot of ways. You want
| S3? You got it, no matter where you are. (We're talking after
| them doing some sort of fee drop here.) You want to run exactly
| one EC2 instance? No problem. You want a message queue? You don't
| _need_ anything else. You can integrate it with the notification
| service but it 's optional.
|
| Sure, some of their services are integrated, but a lot of that
| integration is just "this service pulls from S3 and writes to
| S3", not massive integration at every level.
|
| There is some stuff that is deeply tied in, yeah. But it's not
| like every single AWS service is deeply tied into half the other
| ones and the moment you open an EC2 instance you also are buying
| into a dozen other services. (It may feel like it if you put
| together a network and override the default block storage, but
| that's really just giving you knobs that are simply preset
| elsewhere, not really "lockin".) A lot of it is already pretty
| modular.
| heisenbit wrote:
| Security is a significant integration effort.
| zomiaen wrote:
| Not on their backend. S3 goes down, nearly everything else
| does. We found out last year if Kinesis has issues, so does a
| bunch of other internal AWS services.
| sudhirj wrote:
| They don't explain this, but the naming of AWS services
| indicates how modular they are. Services prefixed with "Amazon"
| are supposed to usable independently, while services with the
| "AWS" prefix need to be used inside the ecosystem.
| H8crilA wrote:
| You forgot about the egress fees. Try running BigQuery on a
| (big) dataset stored in S3. You probably wouldn't even think of
| that because of how stupid that is at the moment.
| fairramone wrote:
| This is what BigQuery Omni tries to solve.
| GordonS wrote:
| The big 3 have gotten away with crazy egress pricing for too
| long - I'm really hoping that Cloudflare's R2 puts a huge
| spotlight on egress bandwidth price gouging by AWS, Azure and
| GCP, and further hoping that they reduce pricing in response.
|
| With the huge margins they must have on egress bandwidth, I'm
| not holding my breath though.
| nindalf wrote:
| Like others have pointed out, it's not about the margins on
| egress. Cloudflare claims that AWS marks up egress by 4-17x
| depending on the region, but this isn't about making money
| off egress directly. It's about creating a moat around all
| AWS services. If you're already using some services inside
| the moat, you're strongly encouraged to use the other
| services within the moat.
|
| If your data is in S3 or DynamoDB, egress fees will
| encourage you to process the data within AWS. You're not
| going to use BigQuery for that. If you want to add a search
| index on that, you won't go shopping around for search
| products on other clouds, you'll likely use AWS
| elasticsearch. That's where AWS makes money - through this
| soft lock-in.
|
| They'll survive and maybe even thrive if they lose the
| revenue from egress. But who knows what'll happen if the
| moat is destroyed? Every AWS service would need to compete
| on merit with every service on other clouds. They won't be
| chosen simply by default.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| > Cloudflare claims that AWS marks up egress by 4-17x
| depending on the region, but this isn't about making
| money off egress directly.
|
| Euh, 4-80x , the 80x is for EU and the US.
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
| datavirtue wrote:
| Have you ever had to pay for your own business internet
| connection that is offered by ISPs for the purpose of
| serving unlimited requests? It is not cheap, at all. Your
| home and/or business internet connection is a joke compared
| to that type of service.
|
| I don't think they have huge margins on egress at all.
| There needs to be some incentive for customers of cloud
| services to minimize bandwidth usage. It is a limited
| resource.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| And your "business internet connection that is offered by
| ISPs" is a joke compared to the backbone AWS uses.
|
| Remember those ISPs need to make margin, that's why they
| charge what they do.
|
| AWS _could_ make it's margin on services alone. They just
| choose not to.
| GordonS wrote:
| Nope, plenty of server hosts provide bandwidth for free,
| or near enough.
|
| Just one example is Hetzner, who include 20TB of
| bandwidth, with anything over that charged at just
| EUR1/TB.
|
| Meanwhile, AWS is gouging at EUR80/TB.
| piperswe wrote:
| I have had to. I pay $400/month for the following:
|
| - A 42U cabinet - A 15A 120V circuit - An unmetered 1Gbps
| IP transit link
|
| All at a proper datacenter, namely Hurricane Electric's
| fmt2 facility. Includes a /29 of IPv4 and a /48 of IPv6,
| allows me to announce the /24 and /36 I own, and there's
| a free internet exchange onsite which I have a 1Gbps port
| at.
| tatersolid wrote:
| 1800 Watts for a full rack? That's bordering on useless.
| You can run _maybe_ two real servers on 1800 W.
|
| You need to provision enough power for simultaneous
| startup after a power outage, unless you have some really
| smart PDUs and automation. We have a 10 year old DC with
| 30A@208V per rack and we have to leave racks half full
| because modern servers are so power-dense.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Gatekeeping server power!? We run 1U on 250-350w (230v).
| So yes, odd power allocation but servers are real way
| before 900w. We're running dual Xeon Gold low core count
| machines (because of Microsoft licensing) and they're
| pretty decent.
| windexh8er wrote:
| There are, literally, dozens of hosting providers that
| bake unlimited egress into their offerings - still.
| Bandwidth is cheap and has only gotten cheaper. Remember
| that Amazon doesn't always need to pay for Internet
| access. It's very likely they participate in Internet
| exchanges tied to other large providers. Given Amazon has
| a massive footprint they likely participate in these all
| over the globe to reduce congestion on their Internet
| connectivity.
|
| They very much have _massive_ margin on egress. Given
| some of the cost comparisons floated today comparing R2
| to S3 egress AWS is likely hitting 1000s of times (likely
| more) their return on the actual bandwidth cost they pay
| for month over month.
| sysihyk wrote:
| CPU isn't cheap, typical PHP+MySQl pages are ridiculously
| heavy, that's why Cloudflare got themselves into
| business.
|
| Usually DoS attack doesn't exhaust the bandwidth, come
| on..
| fomine3 wrote:
| Related: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-
| egress/
| ianlevesque wrote:
| You don't think they do, but Cloudflare estimated AWS'
| markup is 7959% here https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-
| egregious-egress/
| vbernat wrote:
| To move bytes out of network, you need more than a
| transit contract. You need routers, you need people to
| operate them. All this is absent from Cloudflare's blog
| post. With the example provided on South Korea, the
| conclusion should be that the egress fees are only
| marginally infuenced by the transit cost.
| elithrar wrote:
| The blog post on egress speaks to that - but the true
| scale at which the major clouds buy hardware and deploy
| it - just changes the dynamics here. We're (collectively)
| not used to seeing products marked up to such an extent.
|
| The $/Mbps prices there - about $6k/Tbps in the US - are
| based in reality and are absolutely reflective of what it
| costs, hardware, software, redundancy and all - for an
| effectively 1Tbps pipe.
|
| If you're pricing as $/GB on top of that capacity and
| keep it reasonably heavily utilized--which can be hard
| given diurnal demand--the margins only get better!
| Products like Glacier (S3) exist to fill exactly those
| gaps.
|
| (Note: currently work at Cloudflare, but wasn't part of
| this blog and I've been around a bit...)
| selcuka wrote:
| Yet CloudFlare is able to do it for free up to a point,
| and at a lower-than-AWS fee after that. It might not be
| the exact figure but there is most definitely a huge
| markup there.
| ohazi wrote:
| > Have you ever had to pay for your own business internet
| connection that is offered by ISPs for the purpose of
| serving unlimited requests?
|
| Come on, Amazon is not serving traffic through a Comcast
| business connection, they're peering directly with other
| large operators for free or for next to nothing.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| I mean that's another vector for savings... Maybe
| Cloudflare bought their own cable modem instead of paying
| the $20/month to rent one. :)
| gravypod wrote:
| In the few times I've priced blended connections at most
| Colo locations unmetered 10G is ~500/month to
| ~1000/month.
|
| 5Gbps*1 month is ~1.5 PB. AWS is about 0.02/gb or
| ~30k/1.5pb.
|
| Approximately 30x the cost.
|
| These are old numbers for specific use cases so I'm not
| sure how much that has changed.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| We have a customer on Azure running a bunch of medium-
| sized websites. Their mean outbound throughput is just 25
| Mbps, but they're paying on the order of $3K/month all up
| for that Internet egress. (Not just bandwidth but some
| additional overpriced services on top like App Gateway.)
| rstupek wrote:
| AWS bandwidth is definitely over priced however the
| comparison to an unmetered colo isn't quite fair. What
| happens when that unmetered colo gets hit by a 100G ddos
| attack? Everything you have on it goes down?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If the discussion is about what it costs amazon, that's
| not really relevant. They avoid DDOS simply by being
| enormous.
| mattzito wrote:
| In fairness, Amazon also charges for more than basic DDoS
| protection:
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/shield/pricing/
|
| but regardless, the EGRESS charges are what are absurd.
| The only logical reason for charging so much for data
| exiting is to make sure that you can't practically leave
| the AWS ecosystem.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Try running BigQuery on a (big) dataset stored in S3._
|
| Seems like a pathological use case to run a query engine on
| one cloud provider datacenter (Google) against the disk
| storage at another cloud provider (Amazon).
|
| Even if egress were $0, I still wouldn't want to do that. I
| want queries to run as fast as they can and the WAN link
| bandwidth is opposed to that.
|
| Is there anything about BigQuery that would compel anyone to
| do that instead of just using AWS RedShift?
| zwayhowder wrote:
| My experience in most enterprises is that we don't get to
| pick all the tools and sometimes we don't even get asked
| our opinion. Recent case: The data team picked S3 for
| storage, and they picked Power BI for analysis. Don't ask
| me why they didn't ask my opinion at the time (What would I
| know, I'm only the principal cloud architect here).
|
| Things like operational overhead don't always get a look in
| when a team has convinced someone with the purchasing
| authority that tool X is going to solve all their problems.
| Even if the entire org has zero experience with it and it's
| going to have flow on effects.
|
| A recent example at one of my customers was a team deciding
| to outsource a platform to the provider. (Outsource, not
| SaaS it's a managed service hosted in AWS). I told them the
| network design and AWS build on our side to join the two
| would require significant effort and they said that's fine.
| Now we've spent almost their entire budget for the move on
| just working out how to connect their VPC to ours (there
| are some legislated controls we had to put in place and the
| vendor architects were less than helpfull). Of course it's
| all my team's fault because we are the ones who say "you
| can't just plug the two together" and it would be much
| better if we had a "can-do attitude like the other team
| instead of naysaying all the time."
| dx034 wrote:
| It can make a lot of sense. Store data at the provider that
| can do it best, analyze your data at another provider with
| a superior product.
|
| You'll find data centers of all major providers within a
| few miles of each other in at least 10 locations around the
| world. Latencies are <5ms and the links between those data
| centers are cheap and can provide huge bandwidths (even
| though they don't want you to know this and still charge
| huge prices).
|
| So from both a technical and an economical perspective
| there should be no reason why you can't shift terrabytes of
| data daily between GCS, AWS, Azure, Hetzner, OVH,
| Cloudflare etc. Only artificially high egress pricing set
| by the three biggest providers keeps people from doing
| that.
|
| In Europe with OVH and Hetzner that's exactly what a lot of
| people already do (from my experience), also nicely
| visualized in their Weathermap (look at Frankfurt) [1].
| These two providers are tiny compared to AWS and yet the
| 400gbit/s links between them are utilized ~50% pretty much
| 24/7. And from my experience I can say that there are quite
| a few use cases where mixing these providers is cheap and
| easy.
|
| [1] http://weathermap.ovh.net/#europe
| paunchy wrote:
| Keep in mind that most of the big three regions are located
| in the same metro area, often times right across the street
| from one another. They have private network peering that
| circumvents WAN circuits, your data is literally transiting
| between ethernet ports on the same switch.
|
| So generally speaking, latency and bandwidth between
| services is not a significant concern. It's all about
| egress billing.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Heh ... I did something similar without thinking about
| bandwidth.
|
| I had a huge corpus of data and ran some instances that were
| basically downloading+parsing+summarizing data for a couple
| days. Again, I didn't think of bandwidth as they were EC2
| instances querying S3 objects, what could go wrong, it's
| Amazon to Amazon, right? Wrong.
|
| Bill came up in the 10,000s USD range ... fortunately, it
| happened during a trial period where I could spend a lot of
| money for ~three months.
|
| I moved my stuff into a small-ish cluster of unmetered VPS
| and the whole thing is 100x cheaper.
| jerf wrote:
| No, I didn't. This is in the context of a discussion of what
| happens if AWS lowers egress fees to compete with Cloudflare
| by going "modular".
| Jonovono wrote:
| I think you are missing the point. AWS is modular WITHIN AWS.
| It's not a decentralised modular system. ie, it can't play well
| with existing companies because of the hefty egress prices they
| charge. The point in the article is that, maybe, if you take
| away the egress fees that opens up a new world where services
| of different companies can play together nicely (instead of
| waiting for AWS to implement something), and that creates a new
| form of innovation that we can't quite predict that could
| possibly compete with AWS
| bredren wrote:
| AWS Polly is an example of a service that is tied into others.
|
| To do anything more than a demo, Polly requires S3. To get a
| notification of a completed TTS synthesis, you must use AWS
| SNS. To get logs you have to use their logging service.
|
| I suspect the primitives, like these required ancillary
| services, are the ones not tied in to each other. But how could
| they? (AWS probably has found ways)
|
| For my project using Polly, I didn't care. It was kind of
| interesting to explore AWS some.
|
| But I'd guess a lot of folks might not want cloud service
| primitives. They want cloud products.
|
| If they must use primitives to enjoy cloud products, they
| should want flexibility at least to not be stuck with pricing
| and feature set on primitives if they don't compete.
| efangs wrote:
| I was with the article until this final point about integrated
| solutions. I see the argument around data lock-in, but
| integration is typically non-trivial unless it's coming from
| the same provider. Plus, I'm certain cloudflare would equally
| love to provide more services in an integrated way.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| I wonder how this relates to 5G which also pushes more storage
| and even compute to the edge.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| Wouldn't edge infra be more important for slower cellular
| connections?
| Vecr wrote:
| 5G has lots of latency compared to fiber or even good cable,
| if you want the same latency as someone on fiber to a
| regionally hosted server, you need edge compute stuff.
| julianlam wrote:
| I find it deliciously ironic that CloudFlare is eating AWS' lunch
| with their launch of R2, after Amazon did basically the same
| thing with a bunch of their services built upon open source
| projects.
|
| I suppose it's now corporations stealing market share from each
| other...
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > I suppose it's now corporations stealing market share from
| each other...
|
| Uhm, what did you think a market is?
| mushbino wrote:
| Corporations colluding to fix prices as high as possible?
| up6w6 wrote:
| I dont think CloudFlare R2 competing with AWS S3 is a fair
| comparasion to what Amazon did to open-source projects...
| wmfiv wrote:
| "Eating AWS's lunch" seems quite speculative. R2 is a blog
| post. S3 is the industry standard to the extent that everyone
| else creates products based on a subset of the S3 API. S3 is
| also a cornerstone of the AWS ecosystems which has enormous
| gravitational pull.
|
| Cloudfare is an exciting company with a lot of great products.
| But they're less than 1% the size of AWS or Azure. Let's see
| what happens.
| bob-a-fet wrote:
| Can we use R2 for video? Workers KV prohibit use for video. Video
| streaming is the #1 growth area since the pandemic. Why is it
| that we can use it and Workers KV to store images but not video
| (chunked) ?
| [deleted]
| vjust wrote:
| I like this. AWS feels like a proprietary mainframe system (will
| get downvoted for saying this).
|
| Anytime a majority of developer job postings mention a specific
| product/company certifications, (think PMP, or Microsoft
| developer certs) , its time to pivot your skill sets.
| kall wrote:
| I'm a fan of the fledgling CF stack but it's arguably more
| proprietary. You can't run containers, you can't run a normal
| database, you have to architect the application exactly for
| their system.
| lanstin wrote:
| No, my first job was as an intern at IBM and my first non-
| intern computer job was in an AS/400 shop, and my last 2 years
| I've been an 'AWS Architect' and it's the same thing exactly -
| the guy with a good memory knows the entire IBM product line
| now knows all the obscure and bizarre AWS products. It's not
| just product certifications but even you end up building around
| arbitrary limits in the big company implementation rather than
| just modifying the open source code or adding glue layers to
| get what you want.
|
| I have had to write weird proxies just because of some missing
| AWS features, and it made sense because, unlike the last twenty
| years of my computing career, I don't have the source code to
| all of the code running in the environment.
| lanstin wrote:
| But yeah, if I were recommending options to a web group, I'd
| 100% tell them to use R2 and populate it object by object
| from S3. Although I suppose all the "it's ok to put this data
| into S3 with these controls" agreements will need to be
| redone for the new use case.
| aborsy wrote:
| AWS Lightsail now offers S3 object storage with reduced egress
| fees: 250 GB storage, 500 GB transfer, 5$/month.
|
| With standard S3, that egress traffic would cost 45$ -50$.
|
| Sounds like AWS is competing with itself.
| 57844743385 wrote:
| Amazon does not allow you to use lightsail as a back door for
| sneaking your data out at low cost.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Sounds like they want to capture the market standalone VPS
| providers have eaten, and I don't blame them. Not acquiring
| users for small-scale usage means they're less likely to
| consider you for large-scale usage. This is a large part of
| Cloudflare's success - the free tier is marketing for their
| Enterprise tier, and it really works.
| muttantt wrote:
| Cloudflare is incredibly undervalued as a public company.
| wmfiv wrote:
| It's priced at almost 100x revenue.
| el_nahual wrote:
| Kind of. It's undervalued in the sense that it's a growing
| business that will probably track "the growth of the internet"
| (so, will continue growing for a long, long time).
|
| It's _not_ undervalued in that quarterly revenue are $152.4
| million, on a market cap of $35 _billion_ dollars, for a
| staggering multiple of 57 times revenue.
|
| Edit: Had quarterly earnings instead of revenue.
| adventured wrote:
| By earnings I take it you mean revenue or sales, based on the
| rest of the text about the revenue multiple. Typically
| earnings refers to profit in one form or another (often it
| means after-tax profit, sometimes operating profit).
|
| Cloudflare of course has no earnings. Their operating loss
| last quarter was $28.8 million. Their operating loss for the
| past four quarters was $106 million.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earnings.asp
| el_nahual wrote:
| Correct, edited my comment to show revenue. I'm old enough
| to remember a time when an "undefined" P/E ratio would have
| raised eyebrows.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Wow, that pricing and the amount of hype around the co really
| makes me want to short it, looks very asymmetric (good case
| already priced in with a huuuge range of possible outcomes).
| Not gonna do it though, learned my lesson with Tesla, there
| is always a better than best case waiting to get priced in.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| >> "The most familiar API for Object Storage, and the API R2
| implements, is Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3)."
|
| Ugh - a clone of S3's functionality - that's not competing.
|
| There's been zero innovation in cloud storage beyond S3's
| primitive capabilities. None of the competing services have gone
| beyond S3's stunted functionality.
|
| Online storage should provide:
|
| * An SFTP interface (and no, Amazon's "charge by the hour SFTP
| interface to S3" doesn't count)
|
| * The ability to query and apply filters to queries PLEASE! For
| goodness sake its 2021.
|
| * A webDAV interface
|
| * The ability to incorporate object metadata into filtering
| queries
|
| Why is there zero competitive drive in this space?
| mrkurt wrote:
| API compatible does not mean it's a clone. Cloud Flare's pitch
| is "multi-region storage that automatically replicates objects
| to the locations they're frequently requested from."
|
| This is big and interesting and useful even if you ignore the
| bandwidth savings. If it were available already, we'd be trying
| to use it for Fly.io users.
| chillfox wrote:
| Joyent's Manta storage was quite nice, but unfortunately they
| closed down their public cloud.
| dabinat wrote:
| I thought I could save money by hosting some backend services in-
| house but soon realized it ended up being more expensive than EC2
| solely because of the egress fees.
|
| So whether or not Amazon intended it that way, it functions as
| something that's anti-competitive because it forces you to go
| all-in with AWS.
| eruleman wrote:
| A great example of counter-positioning. Cloudflare is positioning
| itself in the market in a way that its competitor (AWS) cannot
| replicate -- their lock-in is predicated on egress fees.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Oracle was to Amazon what Amazon will be to Cloudflare.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| How was it ever possible for S3 to take such a market share. Or
| is this market share not existing? Coming from the 90ies I could
| never imagine paying for outgoing traffic when already paying for
| a server with internet connection. There was a.early time where
| you would get throttled to 100MBit (and much earlier in time to
| 10MBit/s) but this is long gone. What do you do with S3 that such
| prices seem fair for anything other than rarely accessed files?
| kondro wrote:
| They were first and from a featureset and reliability
| perspective, S3 is still unparalleled.
|
| That coupled with storage costs that were always very
| competitive and the fact you had unlimited scale and PAYG
| pricing got a lot of people hooked.
|
| It's going to take a long time for S3 customers who have
| experienced pretty amazing uptime and reliability for the
| entire life of the service to put the same level of trust in
| something else.
|
| CF did a really smart thing by making R2 be able to operate as
| a transparent caching-replica of S3.
| fabian2k wrote:
| I'm a big fan of just renting real hardware and running stuff
| there for a fraction of the price of the Cloud, if it fits your
| use case.
|
| But doing durable storage yourself, especially once the amounts
| get a bit unwieldy is scary. For low amounts of data you can
| get away with just making plenty of copies in different places,
| but that gets much more difficult once it's a serious amount of
| data. Object storage is the most appealing service even if you
| want to do most of the stuff yourself. And this is an area
| where an established track record is important, you don't want
| to store your data if you're not sure the service is reliable.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I know why; I was there! (first AWS employee in EU, 2008,
| stayed there until 2014).
|
| Back then, using traditional IT providers or internal IT
| services, you needed weeks, paperwork, etc, to get any storage
| or compute.
|
| Then AWS arrives, and you could have infinite storage, or tens
| of EC2 instances, within a few minutes. And pay with a freaking
| credit card!
|
| It didn't matter that AWS' performance was abysmal at the time.
| Or that AWS was expensive. AWS solved a huge pain point for
| millions of people, and that's why it became a market leader.
|
| Price is not the only thing that matters.
| deanCommie wrote:
| All that is true, but when it comes to S3, price was
| absolutely part of the magic.
|
| S3 was orders of magnitude cheaper than anything comparable
| at the time.
| tatersolid wrote:
| > S3 was orders of magnitude cheaper than anything
| comparable at the time.
|
| Cheaper for _cold storage_. For anything that requires high
| IOPS or egress trafic S3 has always been very expensive.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Price is not the only thing that matters_
|
| Price matters when all of your other advantages have been
| eroded away.
|
| > _I know why; I was there! (first AWS employee in EU, 2008,
| stayed there until 2014)._
|
| Btw, another of your claim-to-fame is that the current Amazon
| CEO follows you on twitter, one among the 300 odd accounts :)
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Oh yes, I was lucky enough to interact with Andy several
| times. To be honest, him following me is 1% merit and 99%
| random luck :)
| schoolornot wrote:
| Consolidated billing. AWS could in fact raise prices across the
| board and all my previous companies would continue to pay them
| and not care one bit. Finance departments love AWS bills and
| the simple annual negotiations that come with them.
| Macha wrote:
| For one, you only get billed for outgoing traffic from AWS. So
| if all your infra is on AWS, you're not paying for that.
| Secondly the ease of use is a lot compared to back when you had
| to buy a bunch of servers to put hard drives in - remember s3
| was one of the first aws services, alongside ec2.
|
| If your load wasn't high, cause you're a startup or whatever,
| then paying the extra premium on the storage to save the
| engineering effort of building your own storage cluster worked
| out. Then when you were big, those egress costs had you locked
| out.
|
| Plus add in thoughts about having to maintain infra vs aws do
| it for you and you had a lot of developer blogs/marketing sites
| of tech companies/whatever just serve on s3 since it was easy
| to use and the absolute cost for such a product is low enough
| that they didn't care about the relative cost of s3 vs other
| services.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Unless things have changed I'm not sure it's accurate that
| you only get charged for external traffic on AWS: I recall
| having pretty substantial charges internal to AWS just for
| traffic between different AZs in the same region, for
| example.
| electroly wrote:
| I think the parent is talking specifically about S3 rather
| than all of AWS -- S3 is a regional service and you can
| access it from any AZ within that region without additional
| fees. Cross-AZ charges are more commonly an issue with
| things like load balancers and EC2 instances.
| manquer wrote:
| Cross Region is common use case which makes S3 access
| from another region or if you are migrating painfully
| expensive when Compute is in multiple regions .
|
| Cross Region replication is typical setup for many DR use
| cases and S3 will charge you Inter-region transfer cost
| for replication as well.
| api wrote:
| Yes they all do this. I've speculated it's to herd people
| away from running their own consensus databases and toward
| their managed services.
| manquer wrote:
| You are only not charged if all your infra is the _same
| location and same availability zone and same VPC_.[1] The
| egress cost between anything beyond will cost you a ton of
| money
|
| [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/overview-of-
| data-t...
| hinkley wrote:
| I suspect Cloudflare and any clones could set up their
| peering agreements with Cloud providers in such a way that
| they're exposed as a feature. First tier Cloud providers
| probably won't bite because it would open the door to people
| migrating out of their data centers.
|
| Second tier Cloud providers would eat that up, since it would
| democratize things more. Even if a competitor gets the
| customer, at least it's not the guy who is waging a war of
| attrition against you.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| Virtual servers are a thing since ... forever on the
| Internet. At least since mid-nineties you had not to think
| about getting hard drives into servers, if you would not
| wanted to.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes, and that's like saying that you don't understand why
| people eat at restaurants when there's field full of
| cauliflower. If you're comparing it to S3, using virtual
| servers means you're now taking on responsibility for
| configuring, operating, and securing replicated file
| storage in at least 3 geographically separated regions,
| scaling it when you start to fill up those local disks,
| building an API on top of that, and providing web-based
| access. Don't forget things like bitrot detection and
| prevention, storage encryption, centralized logging, event-
| based triggers, lifecycle management policies, tiering onto
| cheaper storage either by policy or automatically.
|
| For many organizations, the 24x7 staffing needed to provide
| an equivalent service alone would pay for their entire
| storage cost multiple times over. Even if your scale is
| sufficient to allow beating that, you are likely to have
| more compelling problems for that time to be spent on.
|
| (This is not saying that the egress charges are great, only
| that I completely understand why many, many people decided
| it was an acceptable tradeoff)
| Macha wrote:
| VPSes were usually not cost effective either if what you
| wanted was a big pool of storage space. The big growth
| opportunity for S3 was the companies that would otherwise
| run their own SANs, not the startup that was going to run
| on a couple of VPSes or shared hosting otherwise.
|
| Even the startups that grew, they might start on a VPS
| provider, but outgrow them. S3 managed to scale with them
| and retain them as customers.
| raywu wrote:
| Good write up. Classic Christensen.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| When I joined Cloudflare in 2011 Matthew recommended the book.
|
| I bought "The Innovator's Dilemma", read it, and said to myself
| "OK, we'll do that then".
| alberth wrote:
| Hi John
|
| Since you're here, would love for Cloudflare to disrupt the
| DBaaS marketplace.
|
| I already run my entire business on Cloudflare (for services
| you have) but there is a significant portion of my
| infrastructure (>50%) I haven't moved over that is dependent
| upon needing a DBaaS offering. With a DBaaS offering, I could
| run near 100% of my infrastructure on Cloudflare.
|
| (Workers KV is great btw, but there are so many times where
| just a traditional RDMS is needed that a key-value store
| doesn't fill).
| axhl wrote:
| Just commenting to signal public enthusiasm for this
| suggestion.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Email me your desired functionality. jgc@cloudflare.
| alberth wrote:
| Will do (and thanks so much as you and the entire
| Cloudflare team does in listening to customer feedback).
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Thanks for being a customer and don't hesitate to tell us
| what we're not getting right.
| bithavoc wrote:
| Any other book you think has been critical to Cloudflare's
| successful mindset?
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and
| Glory at Le Mans
| eastdakota wrote:
| I used to give all new managers at Cloudflare Daniel Pink's
| book "Drive." Summary of a bunch of interesting research on
| what really motivates people.
| tomklein wrote:
| Actually, I bought it right after you told me about it!
| It's super interesting and I learned a lot from it
| jgrahamc wrote:
| That's a good one. Also we gave everyone a copy of "Give
| and Take" by Grant at one point. And I buy anyone a copy
| of "On Writing Well" by Zinsser.
| eastdakota wrote:
| http://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1442871038308618252
| raywu wrote:
| One of the best reads from Christensen, too. I refer to it
| often
| adventured wrote:
| That's an amazing compliment from Christensen. Give AWS hell
| Cloudflare, looking forward to using R2.
| m_ke wrote:
| Cloudflare could really shake things up on the ML side of things.
| The egress costs and GPU prices on AWS and GPC make them a
| nonstarter for most companies, forcing people to rack their own
| hardware.
| mcherm wrote:
| The company I work for is one example (of MANY) that is finding
| it quite cost effective to host on AWS as compared to
| maintaining our own data center.
|
| That being said, I certainly wouldn't mind seeing AWS and
| Cloudflare get into a price war that lowered egress prices.
| m_ke wrote:
| Yes we use GCP for production workloads and enjoy the
| benefits of being to scale at will. I'm strictly speaking
| about hosting large multi TB datasets and running machine
| learning training jobs that end up costing thousands of
| dollars each.
| wmfiv wrote:
| Most companies except the ones paying AWS/Azure/GCP a combined
| $100B+ per year and growing fast?
| m_ke wrote:
| Yes except for the ones that are lighting saudi money on fire
| by having softbank pay for it.
|
| A lot of ML startups end up buying hardware for training
| because they can get a GPU for what it would cost them to
| rent it for 2 months on GCP/AWS.
| wmfiv wrote:
| That sounds right about ML startups. But ML startups or
| even venture funded companies are a very small percentage
| of companies - especially when it comes to spending
| signficant dollars.
| m_ke wrote:
| My original comment was referring to companies who train
| their own machine learning models. They might not be
| spending the way large slow corporations and the
| government do but there's a lot of investment in the
| space and a ton of room for growth.
| aasasd wrote:
| > _It's impossible to overstate the extent to which AWS changed
| the world, particularly Silicon Valley. Without the need to buy
| servers, companies could be started in a bedroom, creating the
| conditions for the entire angel ecosystem and the shift of
| traditional venture capital to funding customer acquisition for
| already proven products, instead of Sun servers for ideas in
| Powerpoints._
|
| So the author thinks that shared hosting or servers-for-rent did
| not exist before AWS' popularity?
| ksec wrote:
| > The service will be called R2 -- "one less than S3," quipped
| Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in an interview with Protocol ahead
| of Cloudflare's announcement
|
| Oh I never thought of that. So the next one is Q1 and final one
| would be P0.
| throw_away wrote:
| Interesting, too, as the unreleased pre-cursors to S3 were
| called first S5, and then S4.
| discodave wrote:
| You mean T4 and U5!
|
| Oh wait, pretty sure those are EC2 instance types. :p
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| What did the extra S's stand for?
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Never heard of S5. S4 stood for Simple Server-Side Storage.
| Source: at AWS 2008-2014.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Secure Simple Server-Side Storage is still on the backlog
| :P
| newobj wrote:
| How is it even a quip? S3 already has "one less than S3", which
| is called Reduced Redundancy (R2). Just for whatever dumbass
| reason they branded it RRS :P
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/s3/reduced-redundancy/
| turbonoobie wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see Pirelli taking a market share in
| the cloud.
| albert_e wrote:
| The joke has already been made on twitter ... with AWS folks
| also jumping in.
|
| https://twitter.com/BentTerp/status/1443083172221161474
| OJFord wrote:
| 'already' as in _before_ 'ahead of Cloudflare's
| announcement'?
| [deleted]
| piaste wrote:
| And it is likely inspired by the old joke that 2001: A Space
| Odyssey's HAL was one less than "IBM".
| eastdakota wrote:
| :-)
| nickreese wrote:
| I love this so much. THIS is why CF is one of the only
| companies I'd ever consider working for.
| amenghra wrote:
| Facebook's csrf cookie and token are named dtsg. I hope
| that's not the only reason you would also consider
| working for them.
| nickreese wrote:
| I was referring more to the context that the CEO is "one
| of us", he is regularly on HN, and is available via
| Twitter/email to constructive criticism. I interviewed
| with CF earlier this year and ultimately decided the
| timing wasn't right.
|
| Love the company but the touch that the CEO gives a ____
| really matters to me.
| [deleted]
| deshpand wrote:
| R language is an open source implementation of the original S
| language from IBM. Its name was a play on S and also based on
| the fact that both the authors of the R language have first
| names starting with R, Ross and Robert. I suppose R2 may have
| been a good choice as well (would have helped with google
| searches)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)
| FigmentEngine wrote:
| and Windows NT and Digital Vax
|
| WNT<-VMS
| cestith wrote:
| With many of the main people from the VMS system brought
| onboard to create NT, too.
| ksec wrote:
| Oh I didn't know that. Both the name and relation of VMS
| and NT. Thanks for sharing.
| cestith wrote:
| https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-
| and-vm... tells some of the story of Dave Cutler and his
| 20 headcount he brought with him from DEC to MS. Their
| influence on NT runs deep.
| xdennis wrote:
| I was skeptical that it was a joke since it's quite a big
| coincidence, but according to Arthur C. Clarke:
|
| > ...about once a week some character spots the fact that HAL
| is one letter ahead of IBM, and promptly assumes that Stanley
| and I were taking a crack at the estimable institution ... As
| it happened, IBM had given us a good deal of help, so we were
| quite embarrassed by this, and would have changed the name
| had we spotted the coincidence.
| mmahemoff wrote:
| I have a hard time believing it was a coincidence.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > Hotel Seattle
| notacoward wrote:
| If Cloudflare is able to do this now, why wasn't Akamai able to
| do exactly the same thing when AWS was still a baby? Serious
| question. Was it lack of vision? Poor execution? Technology or
| market just not ready yet? Without such an answer, we might have
| to consider the possibility that Cloudflare _isn 't_ any more
| able to do this than Akamai was.
| sfeng wrote:
| It's important to understand that Akamai has always been an
| enterprise company. They are not developer friendly, and target
| the 1000 largest websites on earth. They were never going to
| compete with a ground-up cloud offering.
| ignoramous wrote:
| As an ex-AWS employee (although not an exec, but I think most
| Amazon execs would agree), I see a lot of parallels: Cloudflare
| is run the exact same way as Amazon is. They believe in Clayton
| Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation and hence
| continue to disrupt themselves.
| kondro wrote:
| When AWS was a baby charging around $0.10/GB for egress I had a
| quote sitting on my desk from Akamai wanting $1.50/GB for a
| minimum of 1TB per month.
|
| They were (are?) even more addicted to their egress charges.
| mrkurt wrote:
| And midgress! Don't forget midgress.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Sounds like a neat name for fly.io managed pub-sub (jbor
| notwithstanding)...
| pxtail wrote:
| I think that the key here is Cloudflare's approach: mainly
| working in the open - Akamai works kind of "behind the scenes",
| I don't think that developer working mainly for SMB is even
| able to try to evaluate their services, besides - just look at
| their website, it screams "big corps, talk to representative to
| learn about pricing"
|
| I think that big disadvantage in this approach is that they are
| not getting "mindshare", in contrast to that people are able to
| use Cloudflare serivces even for themselves and as they grow
| professionally CF's constantly increasing amount of solutions
| is there as something familiar, approachable and ready to use.
| bedhead wrote:
| All of the above.
| kureikain wrote:
| Cloudflare is truly amazing.
|
| They almost compete with everyone now.
|
| DNS: They eat simpledns lunch Pages: They eat Netlify lunch
| Worker: They eat serverless/lambda as in AWS/GCP lunch R2: They
| eat AWS Lunch
|
| And finally
|
| Email Forwarding: They eat ... my own lunch (I'm founder of
| hanami.run an email forwarding service)
|
| That's being said, from a user perspective, if my domain is
| already on CloudFlare, I can just host everything on it.
|
| Right now, cloudflare workers is pretty great to add some dynamic
| stuff. And pages is great for static site.
| ManWith2Plans wrote:
| I've had relatively bad experiences with Cloudflare's DNS
| solution. Here are a couple of examples of pain-points: 1. You
| can't set NS records for an Apex domain registered through
| cloudflare (even at more expensive service tiers). You can
| delegate management of subdomains with NS records but only if
| you shell out for an expensive plan $$$. 2. Cloudflare performs
| cname flattening for cnames by default. This prevents you using
| cname based dns validation for third parties. One such example
| is certificates in Amazon Certificate Manager which performs
| cname lookups. You can disable cname flattening but you have to
| shell out for a more expensive plan $$$$.
| kureikain wrote:
| oh, ic.
|
| To me, my biggest pain points is I cannot set NS record for a
| sub domain.
|
| My use case is this: I had a certain subdomains where I want
| to use LetsEncrypt DNS with DNS validation. I don't want to
| give the whole domain to the auto renewal script. With
| another DNS provider, AWS Route53 for example, I can easily
| create another zone for that subdomain say blog.domain.com
| and set NS record on blog to that zone. Then create an API
| key with only privileges to manage that sub zone. I cannot do
| that with CloudFlare though.
|
| Agree on Cname flattening. It cause some issue for my email
| forward service in the past.
|
| So we have customer use githb page and set CNAME on apex
| domain. Then they add a MX record for apex domain. CloudFlare
| UI allow them to do that. But upon resolving won't return MX
| records for the apex. So my customer aren't able to finish
| setup. Eventually we have to set the A Record on Apex to an
| IP.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > You can delegate management of subdomains with NS records
| but only if you shell out for an expensive plan $$$.
|
| Are you sure? I have a free site where `in.example.com` is
| delegated to Namecheap's FreeDNS so I can use it for DynDNS
| on some devices that don't support Cloudflare's newer (fine
| grained) API tokens.
| blibble wrote:
| add to that you can't atomically change a zone's DNS records
|
| (I know there's an import but it erases some of the other
| settings)
|
| $0.99 domain providers mostly get this right
| eastdakota wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. I don't think we're intentionally
| charging to turn off CNAME flattening. May be that we just
| don't expose that to lower plans because we're worried it'll
| confuse people. Raised the feedback with the team. In most
| cases, CNAME flattening is a significant win on performance.
| But understand when you'd want to do it in some cases.
|
| Will also check on NS delegation. Again, my hunch is that we
| only charge for it because it's something that less
| sophisticated users we worry would get themselves in trouble
| messing with.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > May be that we just don't expose that to lower plans
| because we're worried it'll confuse people.
|
| It does. IIRC GitLab Pages used to have docs saying to set
| a CNAME for your domain without warning about doing it on
| the apex domain. I'm not sure if GitHub Pages was any
| better either.
|
| It's only confusing the first time you mask your MX
| records. LMAO.
| superasn wrote:
| Wow never knew cloudflare did this. Now if they only started
| offering a way to forward emails to a URL that would be truly
| amazing.
|
| Right now I have to use Amazon SES + SNS for this but seeing
| how cloudflare already has workers, this would be a killer
| feature for a lot of companies including mine.
| goodpoint wrote:
| ...and trying to completely corner and monopolize the web.
| 0xdeadb00f wrote:
| That is, truly, "amazing" as the parent comment puts it.
| sleepy_keita wrote:
| I really like the promise of Pages but Netlify is easier to use
| at the moment. (I have major performance problems with their
| CDN though, so we're sort of half on CF Pages and half on
| Netlify)
| meah0 wrote:
| It feels like a lot of people singing Workers' praises haven't
| really used them in customer-facing scenarios at large scale.
| They are useful but there's a lot missing compared to Lambda.
| xwdv wrote:
| Feel free to list examples.
| ajb wrote:
| Seems like the main misding part is a DB. Wonder what they're
| doing about that.
| eastdakota wrote:
| Building a DB. Several different flavors, actually. But one
| needs to be a distributed, multi-tenant, ACID compliant SQL
| database. We also need to have hooks to allow you to connect
| to any third party database that makes sense for your
| application. So... stay tuned.
| sroussey wrote:
| Awesome!
|
| Also... auth
| rewma wrote:
| > They eat serverless/lambda as in AWS/GCP lunch
|
| Aren't Cloudflare Workers a very specialized kind of lambda
| that's severely resource constrained and whose runtime is
| capped at 15ms?
|
| If anything Cloudflare Workers compete with Lambda@edge, but
| it's very disingenuous to compare them with AWS Lambdas and
| it's completely absurd to claim they eat anyone's lunch.
|
| Cloudflare Workers's usecase is extremely limited and
| specialized: run a script comprised of a couple lines of code
| that do not do much at all right at the edge. We're talking
| about things like adding a response header. Even then they are
| immediately killed if pretty much they don't exit immediately.
| latchkey wrote:
| So very limited, but really solve some huge problems.
|
| I run datacenter(s) with thousands of autonomous machines.
| These machines run a small binary daemon. That daemon needs
| to check for a new version of itself, which is built/released
| as a CI push job on github (after all the tests pass).
|
| A super simple CF worker serves as a reverse proxy to the GH
| API + the download of the binary. For $5/month, I've worked
| around the GH API limitations, in a massively scalable way.
| manquer wrote:
| Interesting use case and solution.
|
| Why not use package publishing tool like packagecloud.io
| (or setting your own private reprepro, dak variation) with
| unattended-upgrades configured for the repos and frequency
| you need ? Was the tooling at OS layer not adequate for
| this kind of setup ?
| latchkey wrote:
| You have a good point. At the end of the day, this is an
| implementation detail and something that can be easily
| changed. =)
| latchkey wrote:
| Looking into packagecloud.io pricing, I'd be in the
| $700/month plan based on transfer alone. $5 -> $700.
| nly wrote:
| You should write this up, it sounds cool
| Thaxll wrote:
| Especially since lambdas are tide to the entire AWS
| ecosystem. It's plugged to cdn / load balancers, s3 ect ...
| Cloudflare has none of that.
| sfeng wrote:
| Cloudflare is most commonly seen as a CDN, has a very
| robust load balancing product, and has a competitor to S3
| called R2.
| Thaxll wrote:
| I never heard people load balancing ec2 instances with
| Cloudflare.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Aren't Cloudflare Workers more comparable to AWS Lambda@Edge
| than regular Lambda?
| rewma wrote:
| > Aren't Cloudflare Workers more comparable to AWS
| Lambda@Edge than regular Lambda?
|
| Yes that's my point. Unlike AWS Lambda, the usefulness of
| Cloudflare Workers is very specialized and narrow, like
| adding response headers or update a response document.
|
| AWS Lambdas on the other hand can run freely for over
| 15min, have virtually no limit in how much RAM they can
| use, and can be pushed as a Docker image with a max size of
| 10GB.
|
| If that is not enough, AWS Lambdas can be tied together
| into workflows with AWS step function.
|
| Therefore, for anyone to claim that Cloudflare Workers win
| over AWS Lambdas, either they have no idea what AWS Lambdas
| are or have no idea what Cloudflare Workers are.
| ElFitz wrote:
| I have used them as reverse proxies to have re-direct
| slack messages to the Firebase project (we use one
| Firebase project per environment).
|
| Also used them to return images from different providers,
| and resize them, on a single endpoint.
|
| Plus, if you decide to pay a premium (but still often
| cheaper than lambda), they can run for just as much time.
|
| All that's actually missing here, for me, is the
| triggering mechanisms and integrations with services like
| S3, SNS, DynamoDB, etc.
| kureikain wrote:
| Here is my use case: I have a static site to process form
| and referral. It used to run on AWS Lambda. I migrated
| them to Cloudflare workers. Deployment, code editing etc
| is much easier.
|
| And no, it's fully act as a standalone app. I define the
| route to to route a part of traffic to the worker, other
| parts to our pages app.
|
| For me, it works great and replace my aws lambda usage.
| kondro wrote:
| No.
|
| The all-inclusive Lambda workers are limited to 50ms of
| _actual_ CPU runtime and can execute forever (i.e. hours) for
| IO bound workloads, as long as you stay below the 50 network
| requests per execution. And for that they cost $0.50
| /million, have unlimited in/egress bandwidth and free in-DC
| caching.
|
| But they also have a more AWS-like pricing option that's
| about 20% cheaper and charges per request, per GB-hour (for
| runtime, not actual CPU usage) and for bandwidth with a
| maximum runtime of 15 minutes.
|
| They also have Durable Workers which provide you global
| singleton persistent functions for stateful architecture.
|
| If you haven't had a look at CF's serverless stuff for a
| while, it's worth a look again.
| ryan29 wrote:
| > If you haven't had a look at CF's serverless stuff for a
| while, it's worth a look again.
|
| That's especially true if your workload makes sense for the
| all-inclusive Workers. I evaluated _only_ the pricing a
| while back and Cloudflare Workers are far more attractive
| than anything else in the market IMO.
|
| With AWS and Azure, it's really hard to calculate just how
| expensive things are going to be. I'd say it borders on
| impossible without just running your workload for a bit and
| waiting for the bill.
|
| With Cloudflare Workers, it's dead simple. As long as your
| Worker runs in <50ms, it costs $0.0000005 per run. I can
| tie that directly to (page) hit counts and calculate costs
| with very little effort.
|
| For my own reference point, I ignored the fixed cost per
| run, which is actually more expensive for Lambda@Edge,
| ignored the variable cost per run, which actually has
| minimums for Azure Functions, and calculated the egress
| cost per byte.
|
| Assuming they use GB and not GiB for egress, it's $.09 /
| 1,000,000,000 = $0.00000000009 per byte. Now take your
| Worker cost and divide it by the per-byte egress cost and
| that's 0.0000005 / 0.00000000009 = 5,555.
|
| That's <6KB of egress for the same price as a Worker run on
| Cloudflare. Even if AWS and Azure started offering free
| Lambdas / Functions, it would still be a bad deal if
| Cloudflare Workers meet your technical needs.
| rewma wrote:
| > With Cloudflare Workers, it's dead simple. As long as
| your Worker runs in <50ms, it costs $0.0000005 per run.
|
| I'm not sure you're looking at the problem right.
|
| I mean, if you write your AWS Lambda code to do the same
| thing Cloudflare does to their workers in their Bundled
| Requests pricing model and automatically kill them if
| they reach 50ms, you also get a dead simple way to know
| what you pay per request.
|
| However, Cloudflare also charges per request and per
| execution time their Unbound requests pricing model,
| which leads us pretty much to AWS Lambda's pricing model.
|
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricin
| g
| kondro wrote:
| Don't forget AWS CloudWatch for logs.
|
| Cost for log _processing_ is $0.50 per GB and the minimum
| size of logs (just for the START /END/REPORT lines output
| by Lambda itself, before you start logging any of your
| data) is about 260 characters (or 260MB/million ==
| $0.13/million).
|
| Honestly, unless you have gone out of your way to
| implement something that isn't CloudWatch for logs (and
| there's almost no documentation on how to do that), its
| not hard to get an extra 5-10KB ($2.50-$5.00/million to
| process by CloudWatch) of logs per request.
|
| Like AWS egress charging, CloudWatch Logs can quickly
| dwarf the cost of using the services themselves.
| rewma wrote:
| > No.
|
| The really are. By Cloudflare's ow docs, Cloudflare workers
| are just scripts that are designed to be executed before a
| request hits the cache.
|
| Quite the far cry from what AWS Lambda offers, which is a
| generic compute platform that handles both long-running
| batch jobs and handles events, and can be invoked any way
| that suits your fancy (HTTP request, events from other AWS
| services, AWS SDK).
|
| At most, Cloudflare workers are comparable with
| Lambda@edge.
|
| > The all-inclusive Lambda workers are limited to 50ms of
| actual CPU runtime and can execute forever (i.e. hours) for
| IO bound workloads, as long as you stay below the 50
| network requests per execution.
|
| You are right. According to Cloudflare's docs, Cloudflare
| Workers are capped at 10ms CPU time on their free tier, but
| their Bundled Usage Model plan bumps the CPU time limit to
| 50ms. There's also Cloudflare's Unbound plan which not only
| charges per request but also adds charges for duration
| instead of CPU time (i.e., also charges for idling time
| when waiting for responses) and that's bumped up to 30s.
|
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits
|
| > But they also have a more AWS-like pricing option that's
| about 20% cheaper and charges per request, per GB-hour (for
| runtime, not actual CPU usage) and for bandwidth with a
| maximum runtime of 15 minutes.
|
| No, not really. Cloudflare announced a private beta for
| their Cloudflare Workers Unbound Cron Triggers a couple of
| months ago, but that's about it.
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-unbound-ga/
|
| https://www.cloudflare.com/workers-unbound-beta/
|
| I'm not sure how familiar you are with AWS Lambdas, but if
| you check their docs you'll notice that, unlike Cloudflare
| Workers offering, they are general purpose and can be even
| invoked from all kinds of events, including directly from
| HTTP requests. So, neither they are available nor are they
| comparable to AWS Lambdas. Thus I'm not really sure why you
| brought up something only made available through a private
| beta and is very limited in it's capabilities to compare
| with AWS Lambda, which is production ready for years.
| gukov wrote:
| On hanami.run:
|
| > Never lost your emails.
|
| Should be "Never lose your emails."
| pjf wrote:
| > Cloudflare's unique advantages in a world where the Internet is
| increasingly fragmented
|
| Wait, it's the opposite, at least on the infrastructure side. The
| Internet is increasingly centralized, due to Cloudflare and other
| big players.
| lugged wrote:
| 10%.. disrupted.
| aborsy wrote:
| Would this compel AWS to eliminate or lower egress fees for S3?
| Aea wrote:
| Not in a million years. The egress fees aren't just a profit
| center, they're a moat.
| pbreit wrote:
| Why is it still so ridiculously difficult to put some DB-backed,
| servable, editable code up in the cloud?
| mathattack wrote:
| The egress costs are finally coming to light for CIOs and CFOs.
| (And pissing them off)
|
| Cloudflare has a lot to gain by fixing this.
|
| Fascinating company.
| rsync wrote:
| "Fascinating company."
|
| I, for one, welcome our new Cloudflare overlords.
|
| Without egress charges, assets in an object store can be backed
| at other providers for disaster/contingency/fault tolerance.
|
| Add the _excellent_ rclone[1] tool which, I assume, will work
| immediately with (just another S3 compatible store) and there
| 's a nice and easy workflow that adds some diversity to your
| infrastructure.
|
| [1] https://rclone.org/
| ignoramous wrote:
| Wonder if Colin Perciva moves Tarsnap to R2... They have been
| using S3 since its inception.
|
| Definitely, appreciate Cloudflare bringing gun to a gun
| fight. GCP take notes.
| xwdv wrote:
| And the stock price is currently a buying opportunity.
| mathattack wrote:
| At 70-80x revenue it's very tough to say.
| hncurious wrote:
| Yea, given that, it may already be priced in...
| xwdv wrote:
| People are always saying stuff like this and I don't think
| they understand, if you wait for a stock price to reach a
| smaller multiple of revenue, you're probably _too late_ to
| the party to make any big gains, and it will be no better
| than throwing your money into some ETF. AMZN used to be
| what, 3000x revenue? Would you have advised people not to
| invest in it back then? How would that turn out?
|
| At the end of the day, you can either sit on the side lines
| and criticize the prices, or you can jump in and _make
| money_.
| mathattack wrote:
| I would have told people to buy the entire market rather
| than try to pick individual winners. :-)
| slownews45 wrote:
| They are? I've seen more cases I think where it drives folks
| all-in on the cloud. A few units tired of dealing with on-prem
| infra group spin stuff up in the cloud. Before you know it big
| workloads are lifting and shifting because its easier to bring
| the data to the new stuff in the cloud than it is to bring the
| cloud stuff on-prem.
|
| That said, if CIO and CFO's are (truly) pissed off, then that
| is going to be a huge revenue swing for AWS shortly.
|
| I personally doubt it. Azure and GCP are not that much cheaper
| here.
|
| And AWS is offering some great pricing actually on things like
| ECS Anywhere, so now if you want it is (a bit) easier to bring
| a workload local to your data lake. I think that is not a great
| short term move by AWS, but long term helps with goodwill.
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