[HN Gopher] The next chapter for Cloudflare Workers: open-source
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The next chapter for Cloudflare Workers: open-source
Author : samwillis
Score : 80 points
Date : 2022-05-09 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.cloudflare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.cloudflare.com)
| Tobu wrote:
| I don't see anything available yet and the announcement is light
| on details. Hopefully there'll be something concrete before the
| end of their infrastructure week?
| kentonv wrote:
| Yes, apologies that we had to announce this before the code was
| actually ready. As you'll see, it's important context for our
| other announcements this week. But there's some work we still
| need to do to release the code. This work is my top priority
| right now, but will probably take a couple months.
|
| Specifically, the Workers Runtime was built as an integrated
| component of the overall Cloudflare stack. We'll need to
| detangle it a bit into something that can run stand-alone. It's
| important to us that what we release is actually usable.
|
| The two specific things we aim to enable with this are:
|
| 1. Testing Workers locally (with more accuracy than our
| existing simulator).
|
| 2. Running your production app on your own servers (with no
| dependency on Cloudflare).
|
| (I'm the tech lead for Workers.)
| rita3ko wrote:
| What details are you looking for? Maybe we can fill you in :)
|
| We still have some work to do to get the runtime ready to open
| source and make it broadly available, but happy to answer any
| questions we can.
| IYasha wrote:
| Staying away from Cloudflare and their products for good. The
| only thing they succeeded for me is scaring away customers (and
| driving them mad in the process), and myself. Just in case anyone
| from CF is reading this.
| aarondf wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this at all? Maybe list some of the things
| that scared you away, and/or drove you mad?
| zxienin wrote:
| Is it just me, or one can't find this open sourced CW repo?
| kondro wrote:
| Another Cloudflare announcement without releasing the actual
| product. Why can't they wait until they have something to
| actually show rather than announcing something that we can't
| have.
|
| R2 was announced in September 2021 and still isn't available (not
| even in open beta). And lets not mention that it was announced
| with the concept of zero-cost for single-digit per second access
| and now, when I look at the pricing page[1], I don't see request
| pricing that's significantly different to AWS.
|
| Sure, egress is free, but $4.50/million write (AWS is $5) and
| $0.36/million reads (AWS is $0.40) is pretty expensive.
|
| [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/platform/pricing/
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Comparing the free tier: S3 is 20,000 GET
| requests; R2 is 10,000,000 S3 is 2,000 PUT requests;
| R2 is 1,000,000 S3 is 100GB egress; R2 is
| unlimited.
|
| S3 pricing varies by region; R2 pricing does not.
|
| So, with R2 you get unlimited egress, 500x the free limit on
| requests and flat global pricing. Oh, and the actual storage is
| cheaper.
| kondro wrote:
| Except this feels different from what was promised at launch,
| before the radio silence for the last 9 months.
|
| Except I can't get unlimited egress, because the product
| isn't available yet.
|
| Egress isn't our price pain point anyway, as you may have
| guessed, it's request pricing. $4.50/million seems cheap, but
| when you're dealing with objects of 4-20KB that only exit our
| platform approximately once it doesn't end up being where the
| significant expense lies.
|
| The blog posts in September all seemed intentionally vague on
| request pricing (which I and many others commented on in
| September) and no one from Cloudflare seemed willing to weigh
| in then.
|
| I could also mention my disappointment with Durable Objects,
| especially as our primary use case for them was to be
| websockets (which also seems to be one of the biggest pitches
| the documentation makes for Durable Objects). But in no world
| does $12.50/million GB-s make sense per open connection
| (that's $1.56/month for a single continuous websocket
| connection by the way).
|
| I even remember reading in a blog at some point (that seems
| to be missing now or so long ago that I can't find it
| anymore) that Cloudflare recognised that fact and planned to
| implement something that makes sense by the time Durable
| Objects came out of beta. But the product seems to be no
| longer in beta and the pricing page seems to be very
| specific, even having the gall to actually list a websocket
| example[1] on the pricing page. $409.72/month for 100
| connections doing 1 message per month is not a figure I'd be
| shouting from the rooftops. This is literal orders of
| magnitude (over 100x) more expensive than alternate
| solutions. Heck, it's over 4x more expensive than the AWS
| Lambda + API Gateway equivalent if you want to compare
| serverless with serverless.
|
| And as I'm sure you're aware, whilst Cloudflare have great
| deals for free & pro plans, as soon as you want to deliver
| anything that isn't really text-base at scale you need to
| move to the enterprise plans. The Cloudflare T&Cs basically
| prohibit anything that isn't HTML or from an API (see section
| 2.8)[2] And whilst I'll acknowledge these are less expensive
| than AWS, I'd hardly call these cheap. The last pricing I saw
| was $0.045/GB, but obviously, given it's not listed anywhere
| publicly on the Cloudflare website it's in the category of
| "if you need to ask..."
|
| Ultimately my pain and frustration comes from loving so much
| of what Cloudflare is and some of the truly wonderful ways in
| which you and your team John, solve the technical challenges
| of being one of the largest CDNs on the net. But I'm
| disappointed that I don't get to use any of them. We're
| either priced out or we get excited that a new Cloudflare
| product is going to solve a pain point, but after waiting
| months for an announced product to become available, we're
| forced to move on or the released version doesn't deliver on
| the original promises.
|
| Which brings to me to my primary point. I wish Cloudflare
| didn't announce products until they're actually (or very
| close to) available, and definitely with complete pricing
| with notes on quotas & limits.
|
| Ignore my comments if you like, I had high hopes that R2 &
| Durable Objects would solve some of our issues. Unfortunately
| the small variance in price for R2 isn't going to justify re-
| engineering and moving our data not only to a different
| platform but to an entirely different organisation.
|
| [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricin
| g/#...
|
| [2] https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/
| jgrahamc wrote:
| If you're willing please drop me an email
| (jgc@cloudflare.com) so this can become an internal thread
| and I can connect with internal folks.
| Wallacy wrote:
| FWIW: https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-
| terms/#cloudflare-de...
|
| "The Cloudflare Developer Platform consists of the
| following Services: (i) Cloudflare Workers, a Service that
| permits developers to deploy and run encapsulated versions
| of their proprietary software source code (each a "Workers
| Script") on Cloudflare's edge servers; (ii) Cloudflare
| Pages, a JAMstack platform for frontend developers to
| collaborate and deploy websites; and (iii) Workers KV,
| Durable Objects, and R2, storage offerings used to serve
| HTML and non-HTML content."
|
| You can use non-HTML content on R2, DO and KV.Thats was
| updated, if i'm not mistaken few months ago.
| kondro wrote:
| Sorry if I wasn't clear, but I meant specially the CDN
| product.
| zxienin wrote:
| Now that CW is Apache licensed, does it make AWS "do it's thing"
| more likely?
| jitl wrote:
| I wonder to what extent this is due to competition from Deno (&
| Deno Deploy). Deno Deploy is new and probably haves less users
| than Cloudflare by a wide margin, but (before this announcement)
| I would prefer to use Deno Deploy or Fly.io instead of Cloudflare
| Workers.
|
| Deno follows the same philosophy as Cloudflare Workers - it's a
| web compatible, secure-by-default V8 runtime for server code. But
| instead of only running on Cloudflare's service, Deno can run
| anywhere and has a growing ecosystem of modules ready to use,
| including a NodeJS compatibility shim. You can even emit NPM
| modules from Deno code using a build step. Because Deno is open,
| companies like Slack have adopted it as part of their first-party
| APIs (https://slack.com/blog/developers/faster-simpler-way-
| build-a...).
|
| I think open sourcing the runtime is a good move from Cloudflare,
| but even as open source, will they be able to build an ecosystem
| to rival Deno over the long run? Their big moat/lock-in is still
| the rest of Cloudflare's APIs - but with an open local dev
| environment perhaps it's easier to convince someone like me to
| use https://denoflare.dev/ and have the best of both worlds.
| kall wrote:
| Another moat they have is the number of data center locations.
| jitl wrote:
| Speak of the devil! https://deno.com/blog/announcing-wintercg
| Deno, Cloudflare et all announce a new web server runtime
| working group... posted on HN by the Cloudflare CTO
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31313540
|
| (Edit: not to imply Cloudflare is a devil! Just a term of
| phrase - I'm a happy Cloudflare customer)
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