[HN Gopher] AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go ___________________________________________________________________ AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go Author : pimterry Score : 641 points Date : 2021-10-18 10:28 UTC (12 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.swyx.io) (TXT) w3m dump (www.swyx.io) | TomSwirly wrote: | > In Chess, you win when you take the King, which in effect has | infinite point value, and it is relatively uncommon to come to a | draw. | | Over half of chess games end in a draw, it's the most common | outcome! | ryanisnan wrote: | On the whole analogy of R2 circling S3 as a go metaphor - what | happens if AWS were to simply nix egress costs? | | I wish Cloudflare all the success, but I don't know if they have | a substantive moat here. | pas wrote: | Then everyone who had to run in AWS now has the option to think | about running outside. Which establishes a new market sector | and puts enormous (?) downward pressure on the price of some | internal services. | | Cloudflare is not worried about this, they want that, because | it would open market access to a lot of juicy potential | clients, who are already cloud ready but AWS locked in. | | Plus they have this shot, they try to make this count, to get | traction. If AWS moves now it'll be attributed to them. At that | point they win by default. (At least that's the theory :)) | Rapzid wrote: | Do a lot of people "run" on S3? I'm guess that sort of thin | lock-in is perhaps a tiny portion of S3 and AWSs utility | billing revenue? | | Even so, dropping egress fees if they see substantial | migration could completely change the calculus on the | switching costs for users. | pas wrote: | Every data processing workload is basically S3 based. | Hadoop in the cloud is nothing more than X on HDFS on S3. | | But egress fees apply for everything, not just S3. | | Currently cross-cloud or multi-cloud orchestration and/or | scheduling makes no sense, because egress fees just make it | uneconomical (in most cases). The lower the fee gets the | better the numbers will look like for mixing and marching | services from providers. | michaelbuckbee wrote: | Just wanted to point out that you can in fact install Cloudflare | on your mobile phone: https://blog.cloudflare.com/1111-warp- | better-vpn/ | lucasverra wrote: | Mmm too much wording for a big-tech overlord free product. | | I've used nextdns.io as a "free & limited" and now paying | customer. | | Get rid of trackers and ads by dns, I get to give them | 20usd/year, so I know that their business model should not be | to resell my data. There is an affiliate link to give if you | are interested. | | iOS app and great UI in the web. | tyingq wrote: | The lead-in is about the 1.1.1.1 dns product, but the bulk of | the article is about the VPN/accelerator, Warp. | swyx wrote: | dear god. of course they have an app. will update! thanks | michael :) | igtztorrero wrote: | "You can check-out any time you like ... but you can never leave! | " | | That's why I choose Digital | badrabbit wrote: | How does their s3 replacement fare against backblaze b2? | u2c4m6 wrote: | The problem with B2 is the API request costs can easily bring | it over 1.5 cents per GB per month. If R2 can keep to free | egress and free (or at least the cheapest) API requests, it | will blow all other competitors out of the water. The only | provider who provides free S3 compatible with free egress and | free API calls is Linode at 2 cents per GB per month. The | downside with Linode is your S3 is limited to one region. For | now though they are an amazing choice because I can have cheap | S3 with unlimited egress in the same region as my managed k8s, | also with unlimited egress. The main thing that stresses me out | with Linode is having to manage my own SQL database... | prirun wrote: | (Author of Hashbackup) B2 pricing is 0.5 | cents/GB/mo, R2 is 1.5 cents/GB/mo. B2 egress is 1 | cents/GB/mo with 1GB/day free, R2 is free. | | If your cloud storage is for backups, B2 is likely to be less | expensive because backups are rarely downloaded and their | 1GB/day of free egress is enough to do backup maintenance to | optimize storage. | | Cloudflare's CDN can proxy a B2 bucket to get free egress and | maybe faster downloads (haven't needed it myself): | | https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using... | | I'm a big fan of B2 because: - they have low | pricing - they have simple pricing - they don't use | gimmicks: minimum storage time, minimum file size, minimum | payment per month, etc. | | HashBackup was one of the first B2 integrations and I've never | had problems with it. | badrabbit wrote: | Thank you. I was going to explore usage if R2 or B2 for | elasticsearch "cold-index" storage. R2 seems more ideal for | better egress. | mayli wrote: | B2 is really good for backups, other providers like scaleway | has similar price if not cheaper. | d3nj4l wrote: | Do remember that Cloudlfare's CDN is not meant to serve non- | webpage content. They outline it in their ToS; section 2.8 | here: https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ | | It is unlikely that this same restriction would apply to R2. | badinfo wrote: | Their CEO was on here the other day and said it doesn't | apply to R2 or Workers, and that they needed to update | their TOS: | | > (eastdakota) That limitation doesn't apply to the R2 | service or Workers generally. We'll update and clarify our | ToS. Thanks for flagging! | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28683255 | djbusby wrote: | What blows my mind is that folk put Cloudflare in front of their | AWS stack. Does one really need both? | judge2020 wrote: | This is often a business decision. Cloudflare's bandwidth is | free, and with smart tiered caching my operation serves 6TB a | month while only paying out 125gb of AWS egress (with extremely | hot files). | AtNightWeCode wrote: | Well, the currently most used paradigm for building web is that | you see the edge servers as your classic web servers and then | see the cloud as a service layer. Good for security and | scaling. Maybe you can achieve the same thing within AWS. | jgrahamc wrote: | Amusingly, I really never enjoyed playing chess, but have always | enjoyed Go. | azemetre wrote: | You should look up a game called Hive. I like to think of it as | a "modern" chess. Games typically last 10-30 minutes and has | just as much complexity and strategy (in my opinion) as chess. | bsedlm wrote: | When thinking about how China came to dominate all manufacturing, | it makes me wonder if China was playing Go and rest of the west | was playing chess | Sohcahtoa82 wrote: | I always imagined it was because China could pay their | employees scraps and didn't care about workplace safety. | | No idea if that's accurate or not, though. | [deleted] | gafferongames wrote: | ... and Google created an AI that beats them both. | gwbas1c wrote: | [Meta] | | I _love_ the custom scrollbar. Works seamlessly, and the chunky | look is cool. | yobert wrote: | It is cute. Wish it worked in firefox though! | mayli wrote: | Yeah, I could borrow that in my next website. | ameminator wrote: | This guy definitely plays go - although I hope that screenshot | from KGS was someone else's game. | alisonkisk wrote: | The chess/go analogy is so weak it's misleading. | | The claim is that Amazon competes on a per-service basis, while | CloudFlare is competing by flanking with related services. | | It doesn't really make sense. | Kalanos wrote: | Amazon prides itself on the "race to zero cost" as a way to beat | competitors. AWS will release a service with feature-parity at | the same price and customers will default to that. so cloudflare | is learning to play checkers poorly. | Kalanos wrote: | Additionally, that AWS service will work with cloudtrail, | cloudwatch, IAM, networking, and will get integrated into | default APIs. Checkmate. | FunnyLookinHat wrote: | > So while AWS has 17 ways to run containers and 7 ways to do | async message processing, all overlapping and reinforcing and | supporting each other, Cloudflare will tend toward introducing | singular primitives, stuff them in a box, and try to ship those | boxes to as many places as will possibly take them. If they could | install Cloudflare on your mobile phone, they would (this gets | them dangerously close to being a real life Pied Piper). | | I think this statement resonates with me the most - it feels a | lot like how I prefer to design systems (ahem, thanks Unix!): | simple pieces or types, chained together into systems that are | easy to understand, maintain, and scale. | | We're still only using Cloudflare's workers and it's integration | with caching, but it's getting close to the point where I'd have | enough primitives to ship some of the functionality of our system | architecture to Cloudflare and gain a net-win for latency and | simplicity. | justicezyx wrote: | > AWS has 17 ways to run containers and 7 ways to do async | message processing, all overlapping and reinforcing and | supporting each other, Cloudflare will tend toward introducing | singular primitives, stuff them in a box, and try to ship those | boxes to as many places as will possibly take them. | | Actually AWS also "tend toward introducing singular primitives, | stuff them in a box, and try to ship those boxes to as many | places as will possibly take them." | | It's just that AWS covers such a larger terrotery, that they | appear fragmented. | | This is why I now almost don't read this type of macro-analysis | articles. They themselves lack the overall birds-eye view, | because they are usually produced by people with little | concrete technical background. | | They often is very good at producing analogy, which is very | intuitive, but very easily breakdown after moderate amount of | details. | chrisweekly wrote: | Cool. When you chose CloudFlare, did you also look at Fly.io? | jollybean wrote: | They are not in the same business. Most of AWS is Big Corps | putting their IT stuff onto EC2s. | | We're seeing the cloud grow and naturally evolve into different | pieces. | mark_l_watson wrote: | Great writup and I love the Go vs. Chess metaphor (I am an avid | Chess and Go player, including taking lessons from a South Korean | Go Master). | | I feel a little guilty using so many free Cloudflare products, | while paying them only a small amount of money for occasional | upgrades. | | If I were building a serverless based startup, I would seriously | consider them over GCP or AWS. | antifa wrote: | > The big 3 clouds are playing Chess, but Cloudflare is playing | Go. | | I think most lay people don't know the nuances between chess | and go and would presume that chess is the more advanced game | based on superficial first impressions. Probably not a good | metaphor because I don't know the author's opinion on the games | and most people will probably see the title and interpret it in | opposite ways. Using "3D chess" instead would have been a more | clear metaphor. | lowbloodsugar wrote: | Well, they are competing for same market, so whatever game it is, | it's the same game. Perhaps it's Fluxx [1], a game where you can | change the rules. Perhaps, from the authors perspective it is | fight to the death, and AWS is infantry lines against Cloudflare | guerrilla warfare. | | But isn't it simply that Cloudflare is following the disruptors | handbook? And therefore isn't AWS most likely fully aware of what | Cloudflare is up to and what the avenues (revenues) for attack | are, rather than bumbling around playing the wrong game? | | [1] https://www.looneylabs.com/games/fluxx | dflock wrote: | Cloudflare are very smart - and they have Second Mover Advantage. | jpgvm wrote: | Sandstorm lives on. :) | | s/grains/durable-objects/ etc but hey, it's still all here. | | Would love to get a blog post or talk on the journey if you are | lurking kenton. | tiagod wrote: | Sandstorm's founders Jade Wang and Kenton Varda work at | Cloudflare | kentonv wrote: | https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1443242614329946118 :) | jpgvm wrote: | Self-hosted worker and object nodes? Fine grained placement | policies? Now we are talking. :D | ryukafalz wrote: | Yeah, though durable objects are a great idea I do wish they | weren't proprietary. I hope they get enough traction to spur | the development of a self-hostable FOSS competitor though. | (Ideally one that's interoperable with it!) | judge2020 wrote: | If it helps, the concept is super-simple and reimplementing | such a service won't be hard if anyone tries to make it | interoperable with Workers. Miniflare (a dev environment for | Workers) implements it in just over 200 loc[0], with the only | backend beint Workers KV for data storage (<500 loc if you | count that). | | 0: https://github.com/cloudflare/miniflare/blob/master/src/mo | du... | nextaccountic wrote: | But, does Cloudflare gives back control to the user? (like | Sandstorm does) | | I think the spiritual successor of Sandstorm is Tim Berners- | Lee's Solid https://solidproject.org/ that was recently cited | in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903601 | | But, while Sandstorm is all about compartmentalizing access to | data in a single server, having the document (grain) as its | unit, Solid does this with multiple servers (called pods) | kentonv wrote: | Solid is a very different approach from Sandstorm. I wouldn't | call it a successor. | | Sandstorm gives the user control over both data and compute | -- users install apps on their personal server, like | installing apps on their phone. Solid focuses on data, | specifying standardized storage interfaces and formats, but | still expects compute will take place on machines controlled | by the developer. | | I think Solid's approach is unrealistic. Developers want to | choose their storage formats and technologies. Even | developers that fully support users controlling their data | are not going to want to bind their hands to standardized | formats that don't support the unique features that the | developer wants to implement, or standardized database | interfaces that don't meet the app's specific usage model. | | Also, no developer wants to have to access data across the | internet from potentially-unreliable servers on the other | side of the world. | | So I think realistically the code and data have to stay | together; the developer has to be able to specify both the | code and the data format. | ryukafalz wrote: | Not only that, Solid goes all-in on ACLs vs. Sandstorm's | capability model. It adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. | jpgvm wrote: | Fair. Sandstorms technical ideas are well represented in | Cloudflares product lineup now but not yet it's philosophy. | Maybe some of that will change some day. I wasn't aware of | Solid, going to check it out! | liveoneggs wrote: | akamai has had Netstorage ~forever so I wish I understood why | this cloudflare product is such big news. AWS is just so much | more | notyourday wrote: | Akamai netstorage was/is expensive, requires a contract and | interacting with inept, overpaid and rather useless sales | people and sales engineering that insist on coming to your | office to yap about their awesomeness a-la IBM, and is a part | of CDN which is also expensive and also requires a contract | with more sales people and sales engineers that insist on | coming to your offices to yap about their awesomeness. | | I cannot wait until someone finally puts Akamai out of its | misery -- they stopped being an innovative company in 2000s. | cryptonym wrote: | Not the first feature to fall in that category. I do not think | it's that big for the industry overall. Cloudflare is better at | PR / more visible than Akamai. | | It might be interesting for markets where Akamai is not really | competing (low budget?). S3 compatible API also is a plus. | liveoneggs wrote: | yeah I also seem to remember being able to deploy a JAR file | directly to akamai in the early 2000's as well, although we | never tried it for production | pqdbr wrote: | I could answer your question a thousand different ways but, to | be concise, go to akamai.com and find me the pricing of any | service they sell. | herostratus101 wrote: | "In Chess, you win when you take the King, which in effect has | infinite point value, and it is relatively uncommon to come to a | draw." | | Great article, but this guy clearly does not follow competitive | chess. The vast majority of games end in a draw. | minkzilla wrote: | You also don't "take" the king. The game ends one turn before | you would be able to take it. | sharmin123 wrote: | How to Protect Your Privacy And Personal Data from Hackers?: | https://www.hackerslist.co/how-to-protect-your-privacy-and-p... | netcan wrote: | The differences between web2 disruption and web3 disruption | strategy games is like the difference between robin hood and | bladerunner. | | Google went _public_ @ $20bn and the papers were full of stories | about Googlers getting filthy rich. Now bloggers casually comment | on scrappy $10bn incumbents and the possibility of integrating a | literal currency mint. web 4 is gonna be a bastard. | | I wish douglas adams was still around to explain this all to us. | [deleted] | daxfohl wrote: | I think much of the same could have been said for Heroku and its | ecosystem. They tried a few critical services and plugins for | everything else. It works great for some things, but not the | enterprisey ones that are actually the profit cows. | | To win this game, surrounding territory is not enough. You have | to go for the king. | agomez314 wrote: | Can someone share a link that describes Clay Christensen's | thought or analysis on his management style? Watching Prince | explain the Innovator's Dilemma piqued my interest | mattferderer wrote: | He has written for Harvard Business Review for decades - | https://hbr.org/search?N=516164&Ns=publication_date%7C1&Ntt=... | | I believe some reviewers of his book say that the book is his | HBR writings organized into a book. In case you're not aware | there is the actual book Clay wrote as well - | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma | fmajid wrote: | No, AWS is playing Monopoly. | rossdavidh wrote: | If that's what they're playing, they're doing a mediocre job of | it. They should be forcing Microsoft and Google to rent their | cloud services, then using high rents there to force them to | sell their own cloud services to Amazon. Not likely to work out | for them there. | | But, to your point, I'm sure they would if they knew how. | judge2020 wrote: | I'm sure they all have some amount of critical backups on the | other cloud providers' services. | discodave wrote: | This is actually a great way to think about it for a number of | reasons. | | 1. Look up what James Hamilton (AWS Distinguished Engineer) has | been saying for _years_ about commodity _economics_ disrupting | things. It 's about the money, stupid. | | 2. The way AWS has been building out their ecosystem is | following a lot of the previous monopolists (Microsoft) | playbook. Get other companies to be 'partners' in your | ecosystem so they depend on your platform? Check. Training and | certification so technologists are tied to your platform? | Check, and so on. | | 3. Amazon and AWS are usually never playing the game people | think they are. For example, all the years that people | questioned Amazons profits, they were doing their best to | _hide_ profits with massive R &D & other investments. | | In the case of CloudFlare attacking AWS network/bandwidth | pricing, it's worth pointing out that >60% of AWS revenue comes | from EC2!!!! S3, and CloudFront is (relatively) small fries. | lmilcin wrote: | There isn't any particular reason why Amazon might not decide one | day to copy Cloudflare as one of their services. | | And then all clients of Cloudflare that are also AWS clients will | switch to AWS for the same service, same cost, but one less | headache. | | On the other hand, Cloudflare is unable to copy AWS business | model. | | So, revised title: "AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing | Go on a board and time borrowed from Amazon" | paxys wrote: | AWS doesn't need to copy Cloudflare. It already has literally | everything Cloudflare does in their catalog already. In spite | of this Cloudflare is still attracting customers at premium | prices. | maxk42 wrote: | There is one: Cloudflare isn't profitable. | | Cloudflare is still in growth mode: They're losing money hand- | over-fist. AWS, on the other hand, is a money-printing machine. | | Personally, I don't trust Cloudflare until they achieve | profitability. They're going to have to raise their rates one | day, and alienate the majority of their customers. | mayli wrote: | Probably not really losing money, depends on the cost of | bandwidth. Since CF has purchased tons of pipes, it doesn't | cost them that much to feed slightly more traffic into it. | asim wrote: | I'm a huge cloudflare fan. Massive advocate for them but when I | do see this talk of them as a new kind of cloud platform I cringe | a little. Are we going to under go the same lock-in like | experience we've had over the years by using very bespoke closed | sourced systems like workers and durable objects. It's one thing | to buy into something that does have wide portability like a | postgres but much harder to buy into the platforms that aren't | open source. | lugged wrote: | Fan of what exactly? | | I thought they were great and had them in front of all my | sites.. til I tested the SEO impact and removed it from every | single site. | | The perf enhancement was minimal at best, the added costs and | complexity overhead simply wasn't worth it. | | Tried their DNS too, 8.8.8.8 was faster for my network. | brian_herman wrote: | 8.8.8.8 is google do you mean 1.1.1.1? | croes wrote: | He said Google's DNS is faster. | jessaustin wrote: | _...til I tested the SEO impact..._ | | Any speculation on what could cause this? Do search engines | prefer some IP ranges? | cryptonym wrote: | I you don't leverage performance related features of a CDN | (mostly cache), it's more a security layer. It won't improve | performance until you get your hands dirty or ask a | professional to tune it for you (and maybe you did). | | A global DNS resolver may decrease performance, for instance | it can give poor results on DNS based load balancers. | | Interested to know how you assess SEO impact and your | findings. | schnebbau wrote: | If you don't set up the caching correctly then loading will | be slightly slower. If you do, then it will be noticeably | faster. | | Anecdotal of course, but the performance boost lead to an | easy SEO jump for our sites. | 1123581321 wrote: | Your experience is a bit unusual. We saw measurable | improvement from edge caching. Argo routing gave us about | 200ms back on TTFB where we thought it was worthwhile. We | could of course set up our own edge caching with another | provider (we also use Cloudfront a lot), but that doesn't | make Cloudflare bad for providing the same service. | Similarly, Cloudflare isn't bad if they provide a fast DNS | alternative to Google's fast DNS--and the mix of features | isn't identical. | atonse wrote: | What's the SEO impact with CloudFlare? | | Isn't that a potential massive conflict of interest if Google | is reducing the SEO ranking of sites hosted on their | competitors' platforms? | | If so, yet again, I can't wait for the US DOJ and FTC to just | rain hell on these people. | judge2020 wrote: | Maybe at some point there were crawlers that assigned spam | reputation on a per-IP basis, but so much of the internet | these days goes through Cloudflare and other CDNs with | shared IP ranges that it would be insane to keep this | practice up. | lugged wrote: | Maybe 2-3 years ago. Pretty sure it was IP based. CF | drops you on a shared IP, its hit and miss of you end up | on an IP next to a bunch of dodgy sites or not, do a | reverse IP lookup to find out what else is running on | your IP. | | > It would be insane to keep this practice up. | | What's the alternative? | | Oh yea, did CF ever fix the domain hijacking issue for | deleted sites? | judge2020 wrote: | The SEO impact is negligible at best unless you have it set | up to specifically block crawlers (or you just forget about | crawlers when configuring rules). | pwinnski wrote: | Do you cringe more or less than right now, when Amazon | dominates all the markets CloudFlare is trying to enter except | one? | systemvoltage wrote: | I am confused. What would you like about CF that needs to be | open sourced? Is it the front end? The datacenter operations | software? Their algorithms? How would that solve the problem of | portability? If there is anything to cringe, it is emotional | appeal to OSS without thinking it through. Cloudflare is a | massive service provider, not a database engine. OSS has a huge | significance in basic building blocks of software - things like | openssl lib. | winternett wrote: | Cloudflare needs to innovate more in order to properly be in a | position to do long-term battle with Google and AWS. | | Their overhead cost is a concern. As a free service provider to | many sites that use them for encryption, they're possibly | primarily benefiting (CDN-Wise) from Google's encryption | assertions made in Chrome. | | A few well-publicized system outages for CloudFlare right now | would devastate their entire business model... It's happened. | | In order to be independently competitive truly, Cloud Flare | would need to probably quickly develop a new mobile phone OS, | web browser, and scale their cloud hosting to market prominence | very quickly in order to be able to preserve their current | market share over the long term, which is a very very steep | mountain to climb right now. | | It's a very steep mountain to climb, because Google already has | the aforementioned things in place, and AWS is firmly embedded | with customers that don't want to face huge costs in | refactoring apps. | | CloudFlare needs to battle Google on many fronts to gain a | proper foothold. If I was in leadership, I'd recommend a | partnership with a struggling mobile phone company like RIM or | Nokia, and possibly with Mozilla on the browser front. | Reassuring users about and being committed to upholding | personal privacy would be another solid move, and then getting | rid of the "utility metered" approach to charging for cloud | hosting and introducing simple monthly and annual rates with | easier services would likely be ideal moves to ensuring proper | growth and market share into the future. | | This is the chess game that wins from my perspective... As | companies like AWS and Azure develop more and more micro- | service and licensing-locked cloud platform apps, it becomes | harder and much more costly for those same customers to migrate | anywhere else like CloudFlare. This is also why competing with | giants is a dangerous game. CloudFlare would need to put a lot | on the line to compete. | | The smartest hosting customers often stay liquid in terms of | which platform they can leverage and migrate to through chess | in development, but the process of getting locked into one host | platform is now a very real threat. Overall success has always | been a chess game to me. Informed and carefully planned | strategy, and conservation of resources, always works best. | streetcat1 wrote: | Last time I recall, AWS nor Gcp nor Azure are open source. | dfdz wrote: | > when I do see this talk of them as a new kind of cloud | platform I cringe a little. Are we going to under go the same | lock-in like experience we've had over the years | | I don't understand your argument. A relatively small but | innovative company is working to provide competition against | the big 3 cloud providers ... and you cringe? | | Even if their service turns out to be more or less a S3 | replicate with better pricing (for some applications involving | a fixed amount of data that needs to be widely distributed) | it's a win for consumers and innovation | nuerow wrote: | > _I don't understand your argument. A relatively small but | innovative company is working to provide competition against | the big 3 cloud providers ... and you cringe?_ | | Cloudflare is by no means a small hosting provider. By some | accounts, cloudflare is world's leading CDN provider by a | long margin, far ahead of AWS in this market, and it | currently piles up about half a billion dollars in revenue. | | https://blog.intricately.com/2020-state-of-the-cdn- | industry-... | dfdz wrote: | Amazon market cap 1.732T | | Google market cap 1.89T | | Microsoft market cap 2.289T | | Cloudflare market cap 55.86B | | Who do you expect to provide competition to | Amazon/Google/Microsoft for egress pricing if not smaller | company who is a "leading CDN provider" ? | | Your comment seems to be justifying why Cloudflare is | ideally suited to provide competition against the big 3 | cloud providers with its R2 offering ... | johnday wrote: | Why would you think that a company's market cap (not only | the relevant portion of the business, but the entire | company) is a reasonable marker for how big of a player | they are inside of this part of the industry? | | Heck, market caps at this point are almost entirely | untethered from reality. {cf. Tesla} | robocat wrote: | Market cap is a reasonable proxy measure for how much | money those companies can bring to bear to win the market | (especially if losses[1]), should those companies decide | that competing is a number one priority. Two examples | from Microsoft: XBox (worked) and Windows Phone (failed). | | Revenues or profits in the cloud market for each company | are mostly a measure of how much they are winning. How | much they are spending is a measure of how much they are | trying to compete, and the amount they can spend is also | dependent on profits in other areas of their respective | business. | | > Heck, market caps at this point are almost entirely | untethered from reality | | Most stocks have some basis in reality, and relative | value still matters even if you think the whole market is | in Lala land. The stocks mentioned are not diamondhand | stocks. Variation in valuation is not hitting two orders | of magnitude, which is what we have here. | | A better measure might be some gross profitability figure | for each company that measures how much each company can | pump into competing (expenses), but that is hard to | calculate, especially for Amazon. | | [1] Google Cloud Losses Shrink 59%, Revenue Hits $4.6B | https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-cloud- | losses... | | Edited: added second paragraphs. | ant6n wrote: | It seems cloudflare makes about 500M in revenue. So their | price/revenue is like 100, ouch. The market seems to | believe cloudflare will do very well. | thefounder wrote: | Market cap. has little meaning nowadays especially in | tech. It's just a pumped-up number. You could talk about | revenue but that's a different discussion. | dfdz wrote: | Revenue for 2020: | | Amazon 386B USD | | Google 183B USD | | Microsoft 143B USD | | Cloudflare 431M USD | | Similar story ... | gzer0 wrote: | Meanwhile, AWS holds 41% of the entire marketspace, with | $14.8 billion USD in revenues per quarter. Extrapolating | that a bit, $60 billion USD in revenues... $500 million is | peanuts compared to this [1]. | | What Cloudflare is trying to do is remarkable considering | what they are up against. | | [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/aws- | earnings-q2-2021.html | nuerow wrote: | > _What Cloudflare is trying to do is remarkable | considering what they are up against._ | | I repeat, Cloudflare is already the world's leading CDN | provider, ahead of AWS by a long margin. This is not a | David vs Golias story. At most it's a CDN Golias vs a | all-in Golias. | | It's disingenuous to compare Cloudflare and it's CDN | offering to AWS at face value based on gross revenue. AWS | offers everything from build pipelines to satellite | ground stations, and even provides backup services | comprised of a big truck with armed guards. | | Cloudflare is impressive and very successful, but it's by | no means a small upstart, specially when it serves a | market where it eclipse all competitors, including AWS. | tw04 wrote: | Perhaps you meant Goliath? | | In any case, it kind of is a David vs. Goliath. | Cloudflare currently employs ~1800 people and has | revenues of under a billion dollars. They don't qualify | as a large enterprise by anyone's definition. They aren't | a 2-man shop but they are very much a David in the | broader market. Amazon is an absolute monstrosity in | comparison. | chucksmash wrote: | Golias is used in some other languages. See, e.g., | http://www.bibliadinamica.comunidades.net/o-gigante- | golias | imwillofficial wrote: | Interesting read! | didibus wrote: | I think OP is correct, I'm not sure a judge would say | that the "market" here is the entire set of cloud | offerings. If the market is CDN, Cloudflare is the | current market leader. | | I think this is generally how things are seen. For | example, in the Apple vs Epic lawsuit, the judge said the | market was "mobile gaming", and that in that space Apple | was not a monopoly. | | Amazon total revenue adds up, but in each of the cloud | categories they operate in, are they the leader? | streetcat1 wrote: | So AWS as well the other public clouds are being dis- | integrated by small startups - see snowflake for DW and | now cloud flare. | | Note that cloud flare is not fighting against AWS or | Amazon but only against the S3 team inside AWS. | lkbm wrote: | At this point they're competing with CloudFront, S3, and | Lambda, but it is still a a long ways away from all of | AWS. | nuerow wrote: | > * At this point they're competing with CloudFront, S3, | and Lambda, but it is still a a long ways away from all | of AWS. * | | Cloudflare's offering does not compete with Lambda at | all. They have completely distinct usecases. | | Cloudflare Workers at best compete with Lambda@Edge, | which in spite of its name is actually a CloudFront | feature. | | https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/edge/ | aynsof wrote: | I'd say that CloudFront Functions was a closer functional | fit (and likely created in response to Cloudflare | Workers). Lambda@Edge, despite the name, doesn't actually | run at edge locations, but CloudFront Functions does. | kentonv wrote: | Cloudflare Workers competes with both Lambda and | Lambda@Edge. Workers is a general-purpose compute | platform that happens to run on the edge; it is _not_ a | platform intended to be specific to things that need to | run on the edge. | | (Disclosure: I'm the tech lead of Workers.) | nvarsj wrote: | That report is very misleading. Customer count is a useless | metric for a CDN. If you looked at total traffic and spend, | Cloudflare would be dwarfed. | andrewnyr wrote: | It is when about 18% of the internet runs through | Cloudflare. | motives wrote: | Source? Assuming you're talking about 18% of traffic and | not percentage of websites, how do you define what counts | as traffic in that case? Transfer between AS's? Does | internal traffic within AS's count? Does traffic between | entities within the same AS count (e.g traffic from one | AWS customer to another, or traffic from a Netflix OCA to | an ISP?) I'm skeptical of any entities ability to fully | measure the throughput of the internet even remotely | accurately. The closest estimate you'll likely get is if | you're a transit provider able to measure data transfer, | and even then you'll be lucky to extrapolate within the | correct order of magnitude from that for total global | inter-AS traffic. | kazen44 wrote: | also, what is considered internet Traffic? lots of | private wan's also exist. which complicates this | comparison even further. | jsnell wrote: | Cloudflare is definitely not the world's leading CDN | provider. Akamai has 7x the revenue. | [deleted] | svnpenn wrote: | Not really. It's a win for CloudFlare, it's a win for | capitalism, and yes, it's a temporary win for consumers. | | But two years from now CloudFlare could be doing the exact | same stuff Amazon is doing now, and customers are locked in | again, because no source code. | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | Let's be realistic: capitalist organizations should not | ever care about source code more than they care about | getting money from customers. When you _can_ share code, | you do (because "open source" has been a marketing ploy | for years now), but when it conflicts with making money, | you don't. If they need to lock-in customers to make cash, | they will, and if they find themselves a monopoly, they | _definitely_ will. | [deleted] | 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: | > But two years from now CloudFlare could be doing the | exact same stuff Amazon is doing now, and customers are | locked in again, because no source code. | | I hear this argument often but it always rings hollow. | | A friend had a first gen iPod - when he wanted to switch, | he discovered that the music he bought on iTunes couldn't | be moved anywhere else because of DRM. That's lock in. | | But this morning I was looking at the source code of an app | built against the Serverless framework[1] and what I'm | seeing is a bog standard WSGI application that uses a | library to transform the inbound AWS "proprietary bits" | into WSGI[2]. I'm not worried about lock-in there because | all API Gateway + Lambda do is "translate an HTTP request | into a JSON object and toss it to an app"[3] - what source | code am I missing? The underlying Lambda/APIGW code? OK, | but do I _need it_ to run it myself? Not really. | | Many - most? - AWS products tend towards this analysis. S3 | is so locked in that, what, we now have multiple very high | quality alternatives that are API compatible? | | The real risk of cloud vendor lock in, from where I sit, | comes from egregious pricing models that make it cheap to | get data in & expensive to push data out. But I'm not sure | Cloudflare has the juice to make this play work: egress | pricing is essentially free money for AWS, so they've got | lots of room to cut costs there - from what I've heard from | people who negotiate _real bills_ with AWS, they 're very | happy to give you discounts there. | | [1]: | https://github.com/serverless/examples/tree/master/aws- | pytho... | | [2]: https://github.com/logandk/serverless-wsgi | | [3]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/develope | rguide... | [deleted] | mcherm wrote: | These are not applications, they are services. | | Which means that the REAL question isn't whether they open- | source the code (not saying it wouldn't be nice... but it | may come with lots of dependencies about their environment | that wouldn't be easily replicable elsewhere) but whether | their API is open. | | And in the case of R2, they mimicked the API for S3. Which | is as close to "following a standard" as I think it's | possible to get. | turk- wrote: | This comment doesn't make any sense. I don't see how | Cloudflare publishing the source code to their own hosted | s3 service would help prevent lockin when an open source | alternative to s3 is out there with hdfs. While s3 is a | proprietary system, Any programs you write to operate | against s3 can also easily be migrated to other object | stores (Azure ADLS, Google Object store) with relative | ease. | | The thing that keeps people locked into s3 are | egress/bandwidth cost. Until Cloudflare came along, no | hosted object store (Google,Azure, including self hosted | HDFS onprem or in the cloud) had economical | bandwidth/egress costs. | cybernautique wrote: | This is actually one of those instances where I'm not sure | how open sourcing a product would make it freer. Don't | cloud providers make their dime by what-they-have, i.e. | your data, instead of what-they-do (i.e., the source code)? | As far as I understand, it's the prices of ingress vs | egress that act as the mortar in these particular gardens. | | Like if Facebook went full open-source... how does that | help, if they retain sole custodianship of my data? | boringg wrote: | How does an additional S3 replica with better pricing help | the market/innovation except adding one more competitor? And | if that's all they end up offering (as per your statement) | their cost is to high. | prepend wrote: | > except adding one more competitor? | | This is a really good reason. More competitors is good for | me. | arcbyte wrote: | I mean competition overall is a great thing. Personally I | wouldn't bemoan disruption of Google et al by Cloudflare. | | That said, I remember when I was rooting for Google against | Microsoft and Amazom against Walmart. Before my time people | rooted for Microsoft against IBM. | | Sometimes we want things to become a little more timeless | like Linux or HTML where it is democratized and much freer | and slower to chamge. | turdnagel wrote: | On the one hand, I hear what you're saying. You root for | the underdog long enough and they end up becoming the | dominant player with the power to match. But this feels | like a pretty apples-to-oranges comparison to me. | | Cloudflare has to buy, operate, and maintain huge amounts | of servers with lots of hard drives, plus all the | fiber/copper connecting them across the planet. Linux and | HTML are software. They're only "decentralized" in the | sense that they don't physically exist anywhere the way | that a cloud provider absolutely must. | Lutger wrote: | Cloudflare is still software. We consume these services | by writing code after all. | | Another example would be postgres. I can rent postgres, | including whatever hardware is used to power it, from | AWS, GCP or Azure. Or anybody really, like DigitalOcean | or Heroku. | | My 'postgres' code will run on every vendors service. The | same applies to containers. | | That is how I understood the comment 'Linux and HTML', | something that is standard and universal, that affords | portability and let's vendors compete on quality rather | than relying on vendor lockin. | turdnagel wrote: | Yes, CloudFlare has software, and I think that only | further highlights the difference between a complex cloud | provider and a piece of software. What good is | CloudFlare's software without the vast global network to | back it up? Pick a problem, though, and there's probably | an open source solution though: CockroachDB for global HA | dbs, there's a bunch of containerized drop-in S3 API | replacements, etc. But something tying them all together | requires a lot of ops work that you don't get through | software alone. | karlerss wrote: | The portable thing coming out of this is S3. Your S3 code | runs on multiple vendors (and locally, with some hassle) | too! | yholio wrote: | Is there something that is fundamental to the cloud that | promotes vendor lock-in? I can understand it from operating | systems and retailers. | | But is there some fundamental obstacle that prevents most | cloud services to be delivered by commodity RFC-compliant | vendors? Or maybe some glue software layer, that, once you | purchase a license, can abstract away the actual provider | and make it simply a price decision? | | I understand the providers will fight tooth and nail | against commoditization, but once the initial wave of | innovation and savage competition has passed, do they have | a fundamental tool to prevent it? | jimbokun wrote: | > That said, I remember when I was rooting for Google | against Microsoft and Amazom against Walmart. | | Those were concrete improvements for customers. Better | products and pricing and convenience vs. the incumbents. | | So if new companies can do the same thing to Google and | Amazon, all the better. | kortilla wrote: | > A relatively small but innovative compan | | Cloud flare is massive in internet impact and is a publicly | traded corporation worth billions. There is nothing small | here. | | > ... and you cringe? | | Of course, the end game is exactly the same for cloudflare. A | proprietary solution that locks you into their platform | instead of AWS's or GCP's. | | Oh how people have forgotten was open source was about in the | 90s and 00s. | FunnyLookinHat wrote: | > It's one thing to buy into something that does have wide | portability like a postgres but much harder to buy into the | platforms that aren't open source. | | I tend to feel the same as you - preferring portable solutions | that I can host anywhere. However, the reality that we're all | building CI/CD pipelines as much as we are actual software | nowadays, and moving those from one cloud provider to another | is no small feat. Even if you're using some infrastructure-as- | code tool to manage all of your resources (e.g. terraform), you | can't really `SET TARGET=GCP` and re-run the script (so to | speak). | | I guess the lesson is: spend as much time picking your | infrastructure provider as you do your core technical stack. | They're not easy to replace! :-) | gls2ro wrote: | Great point about CI/CD pipelines being hard to move between | cloud providers. I wish someone will do for CI/CD what | Docker/k8s did for cloud deployment and provide a non- | proprietary structure that can be easily transferred. | adamgordonbell wrote: | We are building that layer for CI at Earthly. | | But, depending on your use case, you could also try to | describe your build process is some combination of make | files and dockerfiles and then just call that from whatever | CI you are using. | forty wrote: | First time I discovered earthly I found it looked cool, | but then I encountered the issue that it needed | privileged docker which is not really practical in our | setup, as this would require launching one VM per build | job (we are using gitlab CI) | | Is it still an issue? If yes, any plan to lift this | limitation? | adamgordonbell wrote: | It is a limitation we want to lift where we can and that | we are working on. I'd love to hear more about your use- | case. Email is in profile. | gjsman-1000 wrote: | Should've sounded the alarm 15 years ago when S3 was invented. | asim wrote: | So the interesting thing, back then I think we were willing | because of the nascent state of cloud services. We hadn't | fully bought into any of this because most were still just | buying hardware or renting servers and building their own | software. S3 and EC2 were pretty pivotal in the move to this | lock-in from a pure infrastructure perspective. Luckily s3 | equivalent apis exist on every cloud provider now, its a | staple cloud service but I think in 2021 as more things | appear, they should be open source first. The open source | companies start with that, I think cloud companies should | actually open source the tech too. | blacktriangle wrote: | Honestly you touch one one of the reasons I love Heroku so | much. I've never seen a service that manages to do so much of | the heavy lifting for me, but at the same time be 0 lock-in. | I've helped move 2 apps off Heroku once they hit a point where | they needed a bit more operational flexibility and there was | zero work to disentangle them from Heroku operationally. Try | that with AWS, GCE, or anything else. | tyingq wrote: | >by using very bespoke closed source | | I don't see that as an issue right now. They are closed source. | But the workers and key/value apis are (so far) either close to | native, or very simple in nature. Porting away would be fairly | straightforward. It may be a space to watch as more features | roll out. | dgb23 wrote: | They're smart about this. It's infrastructure lock-in but not | at the API/application level, as they are trying to stay as | close to "just JavaScript with browser API semantics" as | possible. Deno is a project that does this too. If you know | service workers and web workers you know Cloudflare Workers. If | you know JS OO you know Durable Objects (to a degree). | | Think about it, the huge influx of web developers that have | been growing up on just using JS. Look at their docs too. It's | all very accessible, modern, low friction stuff all while they | are selling us their infrastructure. And they communicate in a | technical, programmer friendly way as opposed to the | business/marketing jargon that we are used to by some of the | others. | asim wrote: | I think when you say it like this it makes a lot of sense. | I'm not a JS dev, that's not my world, but I do understand | building primitives for a given audience so if that's their | target market makes sense. I just think as they try to battle | AWS and explore wider demographics they're going to need to | accept some of what that requires. CloudFlare isn't a slick | brand like many of the startups around today in JS land. | They're playing a different game as a public company so feels | like wider adoption is going to require something more. | | But saying that, I love when companies push the boundaries | and CloudFlare are doing that. Conforming to the norms is | just becoming another boring IBM like machine. | badinfo wrote: | What do you mean by "Cloudflare isn't a slick Brand"? | | I feel like they're the only cloud company that's been | doing any real innovation for the last 5-10 years, and in a | very approachable and affordable way. | | What's un-slick about them? | lewisjoe wrote: | As much as I like to have something else leading this market | other than AWS (I hate them for several reasons, but insensitive | billing plans, cockpit like interface and lock-in services are | the top ones), I'd also hate to see Cloudflare become another | AWS. | | Are there any tech disruption that will make computing resources | affordable for solopreneurs/startups as they once used to be. For | the past decade I've seen a very slow gradual decrease in the | affordability of cloud computing cost. I trust WASM and WASI will | have a huge effect in democratizing the market but I'm not sure | yet. | mooreds wrote: | > I've seen a very slow gradual decrease in the affordability | of cloud computing cost. | | What do you mean by "cloud computing cost"? Digital Ocean will | sell you a VPS for $5/month with 1TB bandwidth included. There | are tons of hosting providers that offer something similar. | | These prices don't seem higher than they were 10 years ago. | | What am I missing? | lewisjoe wrote: | Yes but try running a couple of servers with a decent amount | of ram say 4GB and we'd notice how the cost goes exponential. | | Point being running a couple of servers with a decent ram and | a decent amount of storage shouldn't cost 50$. It should be | say, 7$. I know the ask is too much. Just want to see if | there'd be any fundamental tech breakthrough to make | something like this happen. | BenjiWiebe wrote: | A Linode VPS with 4GB RAM costs $20/month, 4 times more | then the 1GB instance. | | Dedicated VM is $30/month for 4GB, but that's the smallest | so can't compare there. But that's only a little bit more | than the shared vps, so I'd consider it pretty reasonable. | | A few years ago I couldn't find a $5/month option. The | cheapest Linode was $10/month. | | _EDIT_ checked Wayback Machine...10 years ago, a 512MB RAM | Linode cost $19.95 /month. | wongarsu wrote: | Hetzner cloud has nodes with 4GB RAM for $5.70. For $40 you | get a dedicated server 64GB RAM and 2 512GB SSDs and 1 | Gbit/s unmetered uplink. | | Servers are incredibly affordable. AWS isn't because they | don't have to be (giving startups $100k credits and | coaching them on how to achieve the strongest lock-in works | well for them) | Rapzid wrote: | I'm really, really confused about all the discussion of R2 as if | it were completely fungible with S3. | | Certainly for certain use cases it could be an alternative. Even | as an adjunct to existing S3 use. | | However without IAM integration, bucket events, and etc. there is | a huge set of use cases where it wouldn't even be a blip on | peoples radar. | | Chess vs Go? Couldn't AWS just lower their prices for egress with | low to medium(medium for AWS) effort? What am I missing here? | pierofoti wrote: | The missing IAM functionality is also what is preventing myself | moving some services to R2. CloudFlare Workers are not 1:1 with | AWS Lambda either, yet they have seen significant improvements, | which likely continue to accommodate for more use cases. I | suspect R2 will see similar improvements. | | AWS having high egress fees is the moat around their business. | If AWS respond by lowering egress costs then they are opening | the fort. | purple_ferret wrote: | Counterpoint: Cloudflare is a poorly run company that is well | known for paying cheap. They don't have the clout to be a | successful slavedriver like Amazon, so unless they shape up, | they're not getting on the level of Microsoft/Amazon/Google. | tromp wrote: | Minor quibbles about game remarks: | | Contrary to what the article claims, draws in chess are very | common (on the other hand, they're exceedingly rare in Go, and | often impossible due to fractional komi). | | Sente in Go does correspond to having the initiative, but a move | that compels a player into a particular follow-up move should be | called a "kikashi" (forcing move). | squidlogic wrote: | This sounds similar to the concept of tempo in chess. A move | that comes "with a tempo on a piece" is a move that gains a | tempo by attacking that piece. | MauranKilom wrote: | Also, the king is never taken in chess. Well, outside of | variants at least. But that's admittedly irrelevant to the | article. | elzbardico wrote: | I'd even say that when playing black against someone of roughly | the same or higher level than you, a draw is your goal. | jacobsenscott wrote: | White's advantage is so small - this is only true at the very | highest levels of play. | raziel2p wrote: | Draws are extremely common in high level play, and statistics | don't seem to exist for _all_ levels of play, but I 'm willing | to guess that it's fairly uncommon across all games of rating | 1600 or higher. | danielbarla wrote: | I agree that publicly available large datasets / statistics | become fairly rare below the 1600, above that level they are | fairly common. | | But anecdotally, I once messed around with a bunch of large | datasets for the purpose of comparing high-level play to | lower ones, and the statistics weren't spectacularly | different. Yes, the results are essentially far more random | the lower you go (especially below 1800, where play is | essentially a lot less accurate), but draws are still fairly | common at the 1600 level. If memory serves, top-level games | had around two-thirds end in a draw, while at the 1600 level, | it was basically down to one third. Not what I would call | uncommon, though certainly no longer the dominant result. | kmm wrote: | According to the Lichess opening explorer[0], across their | ~419 million games, only 5.3% ended in a draw. If you change | the database from Lichess to Masters however, with a total of | 2 million games, about 43% end in a draw. | | Anecdotally, I'm rated ~1700 and only 2% of my games were | drawn, and most of those were stalemates. | | 0: https://lichess.org/analysis#explorer | 29athrowaway wrote: | Historically, draw was possible due to both players getting the | same amount of points ("jigo"), but when playing under most | popular modern rulesets, fractional komi serves as a | tiebreaker. | | Games can be voided due to a complex ko or superko. | | There are modern rulesets with non-fractional komi such as the | Ing rules (komi = 8.0) where jigo is possible. But under those | rules, in the case of jigo, black wins... making komi | effectively the same as 7.5. | | For multiple games (e.g.: jubango), a draw can be declared if | both players win the same number of games. | rocqua wrote: | Generally in Go 'draw' does not exist. | | The exceptions are non-fractional komi, and the exceedingly | rare triple ko, which does not technically cause a draw, just | an infinite game. Which is generally resolved as a 'draw' by | mutual agreement. There are interesting rule variants to | exclude the option of infinite games, but they have weird side- | effects. | | I'd feel confident saying that normal go (19x19 japanese rules | with 6.5 komi) does not have draws. | ameminator wrote: | Hey, where's the love for triple Ko? | aurelianito wrote: | AFAIK, triple ko games are usually played again, and they are | extremely rare. | platz wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_strategy_and_tactics#Sente_... | | > A player whose moves compel the opponent to respond in a | local position is said to have sente (Xian Shou ), meaning they | player has the initiative; the opponent is said to have gote | (Hou Shou ). Sente means 'preceding move' (lit: 'before hand'), | whereas gote means 'succeeding move' (lit: after hand'). | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms#Kikashi | | > Unlike sente, though, a move is kikashi when it yields a high | efficiency in play by forcing the opponent to abandon a course | of action. | | Kikashi seems rather techincal and quite narrow in where it can | be applied. | conistonwater wrote: | Wikipedia isn't very good at explaining go, Sensei's Library | is much better and has the advantage of being written by go | players for other go players: | https://senseis.xmp.net/?Kikashi | https://senseis.xmp.net/?Sente | pohl wrote: | This reads as though the entire chess vs go conceit was meant | only to bait eyes into making it all the way down to the last | paragraph, which jumps the shark by dignifying Web3 nonsense. | noasaservice wrote: | A different problem is that, at least with federal agencies, | Cloudflare has a _BAD_ name. Like unbelievably bad. They do have | a FedRAMP offering as of this year.. | | But I've been on calls with agencies. Dept heads, executive yuck- | de-yucks. And we've gotten, "Are you using Cloudflare?" We don't, | and say so. Resoundingly, we get "GOOD" | | We have no clue what the story and history is there. It's bad for | sure. And nobody will answer _why_. | | On the commercial end, this makes sense. But damn, egress from | the majors _suck_. But that 's roach motel computing... | snowwrestler wrote: | Cloudflare's priority is growth. They intentionally take on | customer risk and technical risk to try to maximize growth. | | As a result they incline toward hosting whoever wants to use | them, and moving fast and breaking things. Neither of these | align with typical federal govt approach to IT infrastructure, | which emphasizes reliability and avoiding known risk. | | It's just a big personality mismatch, and there's no reason for | either to resolve it. Cloudflare doesn't need the feds, and the | feds don't need Cloudflare, at least not commercially. | RNCTX wrote: | I'd wager that dept heads and executive yuck-de-yucks by and | large only know what they heard from other dept heads and | executive yuck-de-yucks, which is that Cloudflare didn't buy | into the censorship-by-boardroom-committee plans of the two | American political parties over the past few years. | wp381640 wrote: | Is see this as a positive for Cloudflare | rocqua wrote: | I know there was a lot of pressure on Cloudflare to drop | hosting for 8chan. And it took a long time for Cloudflare to | budge. | | In general, I could imagine there being pressure on those | grounds against using Cloudflare. | polote wrote: | Cloudflare is a CDN. Nobody is going to use them to store their | data even if they are cheaper. If customers cared about price | they are already using B2 and B2 is still cheaper than R2. | | Cloudflare is not eating anyone. They are just trying to expand | their TAM. Cloudflare has always been very good at engineering | marketing, and R2 is another masterclass but it will never eat S3 | d23 wrote: | > Cloudflare is a CDN. Everyone would readily consider using | them to store their data since they're cheaper. Customers that | care about price may have cheaper options, but Cloudflare has | excellent engineering marketing. | | > Cloudflare will be eating everyone. They are trying to expand | their TAM, and R2 is a masterclass. | | Figured I'd throw another overconfident unsubstantiated claim | into the mix. I was even able to use the same exact points to | argue the opposite position. | Joe8Bit wrote: | Good article, thanks for submiting! | | The challenge for AWS is one lots of incumbents have experienced: | they created a market and it's economics and now they're being | attacked by the next generation of market entrants who've | structured their businesses to _specifically_ attack those | economics. | | What's interesting is that challenge can be a really big problem | for incumbents, as those economics can form a core (very rigid) | part of their operating model; it can make it VERY hard to | address without fundamental (read: risky) change to a business. | There aren't many examples of incumbent businesses doing it | successfully, as it needs a kind of 'self-inflicted disruption' | that's very hard to do in large organisations where politics and | empire building can make it difficult. | | If someone could do Managed NAT Gateway next I'd appreciate it! | whoisjuan wrote: | > The challenge for AWS is one lots of incumbents have | experienced: they created a market and it's economics and now | they're being attacked by the next generation of market | entrants who've structured their businesses to _specifically_ | attack those economics. | | Absolutely. This exactly what Tesla has been doing with car | industry incumbents. For example, the higher specs versions of | the Model 3 beat +$100k cars in acceleration, raw power, | torque, handling, etc. | | Incumbents have been selling performance as a high-ticket price | feature for decades. Traditional brands cannot compete on high- | performance features against Tesla without cannibalizing their | ICE offering. | bboylen wrote: | Too bad they shot themselves in the foot with the cybertruck | design. Don't get me wrong I think it's funny/cool that a car | with that design is out there, but it just won't be able to | eat up the high-end performance truck market even if it has | insane torque. | KingMachiavelli wrote: | Really? Assuming the cyber truck actually ships I think it | will be crazy popular. It's a very competitive price for | pretty great truck at least on paper. Sure there is a | market segment that isn't going to buy anything but an F150 | but they probably aren't going to get a electric car | anyway. Plus the cybertruck will probably attract as many | or more hummer/mall-crawler enthusiasts. | handrous wrote: | I'm seeing "truck guys" giving a shit about Ford's upcoming | all-electric truck in a way they didn't about the cyber | truck, except as a curiosity. I think they screwed up the | marketing on that in just about every possible way, | including the name and the design. | XorNot wrote: | I'd argue it's because the electric F150 has an actual | release date and specs designed to take the Cybertruck on | head first. | | Has there been any follow ups on the Cybertruck recently? | So far it seems like vaporware. | sitkack wrote: | The eF150 is going to expand the truck market. Cyberwagon | is Tesla's Aztek. | McScrooge wrote: | Are there any examples of an org creating an internal | competitor to disrupt external competitors and potentially | replace itself? | oblio wrote: | iPhone killed the iPad. | | Netflix streaming killed Netflix DVDs-by-mail. | | Azure-cross-platform-support-is-king is sort-of killing | Windows-only-tools. | | It's still super hard to do, but every CEO post-2000 has read | the innovator's dilemma and you can see that in their | actions. | filereaper wrote: | >iPhone killed the iPad. I think you meant iPod here. | [deleted] | htrp wrote: | Many have tried .... no one has succeeded because internal | venture innovation is hard. | oblio wrote: | Any day now Google Allo, Hangouts, Talk, Chat, Plus, Wave, | Messages, Voice, Duo, Meet will displace Facebook | Messenger/WhatsApp! Just you wait!!! | jhawk28 wrote: | Apple's products regularly cannibalize themselves. | badinfo wrote: | Google had a relatively good chat product, Google Talk. Then | they invented Google Hangouts, Google+, Wave, Allo, | Messenger, Meet, and Chat. | | Now IRC is dead. Who gets the last laugh, huh?! | delecti wrote: | Google Talk evolved into Hangouts which then evolved into | Chat. It's all one continuous line with a terrible | marketing strategy. From what I can tell, Meet seems to be | just a confusing way to access Hangouts video chats. | PeterCorless wrote: | You could also argue that Google tried to reinvent Skype, | Slack, Discord, and a million other chat apps, and they | cannibalized their own offerings because they were feckless | and mercurial. | badinfo wrote: | Yeah, and also cuz they kinda sucked. 1st-gen iMessage, | or even old-school Trillian, was loads better than | Google's graveyard of shitty chat products. | | Google had no overarching chat strategy, just threw gobs | of money and different teams at reinventing different | spokes of the wheels, never thinking about the cart as a | whole. | dang wrote: | Could you please stop creating accounts for every few | comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is | in the site guidelines: | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. | | You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to | be a community, users need some identity for other users | to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames | and no community, and that would be a different kind of | forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all& | type=comme... | | Also: please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait | comments to HN. We're trying for a different sort of site | here. | dehrmann wrote: | Netflix streaming killed Netflix by mail. | jopsen wrote: | Was streaming cheaper? Or rather didn't streaming have | higher margins? | machinerychorus wrote: | Maybe google does something like this, with their myriad | services? but then everyone complains about them constantly | killing off products | sitkack wrote: | No they just fracture and kill markets. | mooreds wrote: | > If someone could do Managed NAT Gateway next I'd appreciate | it! | | Yes please! Such a useful networking tool, but so expensive to | run as a managed service. | | Yes, you can run your own EC2 instance (searching turned up | this guide, which looks useful: | http://evertrue.github.io/blog/2015/07/06/the-right-way-to-s... | ) but it'd be great to have this run by a cloud provider, yet | be affordable. | matsur wrote: | We (Cloudflare) have got some things cooking here :) | | I'd love to hear more about what problems you're trying to | solve/features you'd like to see besides "cheaper" -- can you | email me at rustam at cloudflare ? | outworlder wrote: | Not OP but I'll add: | | AWS can only have a single NAT gateway per | subnet/availability zone(they are usually added in the | route table as 0.0.0.0/0). Nat GWs can only scale up so | much. If we blow past the limits, then the only option is | to use resources from a different subnet. I realize things | cannot scale vertically forever, but the fact that one can | scale horizontally (by adding more NAT GWs in different | subnets) tells me that there could be an architecture that | would make this a non-issue to customers. | | Also if a NAT Gateway has issues (see the outage on Aug | 31st) we, the customers, have to figure out how to route | around it. | | In Google Cloud you can (easily) add multiple NAT gateways | as your requirements grow, while staying in the same | subnet. Not sure how far one can go (didn't go past 20 Nat | GWs or so). We still have to worry about that (specially | since in GCP the number of allowed connections is much | smaller), ideally we shouldn't have to worry about this | either :) | | Azure does not have the same concept because they are | bonkers (outgoing traffic goes out of your load balancer | (?!)) | mooreds wrote: | This is our major need right now: | | https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/1393 | | Basically, providing a static IP to some EC2 instance | traffic so that folks can add an IP to their firewall. | outworlder wrote: | A single EC2 instance might not cut it. The AWS Managed NAT | GW scales up to 45Gbps. They can also support 55k connections | to a single destination (multiply that by the number of | permutations on your triple - IP addr, destination port, | protocol). | | If you have single EC2 instance doing the job of a managed | NAT, another equivalent EC2 instance is enough to max it out. | | You may need a fleet of instances if your requirements are | large. Which means that you have a bunch of operational | aspects to worry about and the NAT Gateway calculation starts | to become more palatable (once you start adding the human | cost of maintaining your own, etc). | | Pricing is still outrageous though. AWS has economies of | scale that we don't. | bezosjuice wrote: | Bezos can spin up a greenfield cloud team and specifically | target the new competition if he needs to. | | AWS has nothing to fear making 45 billion last year. | nhumrich wrote: | Google cloud has a managed nat gateway. | treis wrote: | It does seem like CF is coming in and burning down the market | instead of capturing part of it. Free is cool for developers | but not exactly great for profits. | | I can see a long term strategy where the next unicorn starts on | CF and eventually pays them money. But it also feels like the | big fish will migrate to AWS leaving CF with the cheap clients. | coenhyde wrote: | I feel your view of CF is about 4 years old. Combine CF's | Cloud strategy with their IT/Security offerings (eg | Cloudflare One), they are effectively building a new layer on | the internet. Very sticky and hard to replicate unless you | cover all bases like Cloudflare. Though, it might usher in a | dark age if they are too successful. They could end up owning | the internet. | treis wrote: | I'm talking specifically about R2 and other offerings where | they're competing more directly with AWS. | | Their other stuff is where you want to be in business. | Market leading technology that you can charge a premium | for. | headphoneswater wrote: | Free at a small scale sure, my company pays CF a bundle and | we're not a unicorn | brightball wrote: | IMO the services that Cloudflare offers more than justify the | price when you have even a minimal budget to pay for them. | jgrahamc wrote: | _they created a market and it 's economics and now they're | being attacked by the next generation of market entrants who've | structured their businesses to _specifically_ attack those | economics_ | | https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan... | MauranKilom wrote: | Did you purposely link to it on Amazon? :) | netcan wrote: | This is a good point but... Innovation without disruption | tends to get underlooked, being less dramatic. | | Think of the old auto companies over the years. They start | off making tractor-like cars. They survive through the cars- | as-fashion eras, the internationalisation of manufacturing, | etc. If old auto companies emerging from the 80s were new, | we'd call it disruptive innovation. | | That said, both disruption and innovator's dilemma are real. | | The innovator dilemmas also roughly corresponds to stuff | early economists wrote about. Peak markets. Markets are great | as they grow. When they reach their terminal size (eg most | people already own cars), profits go down, stagnation can | occur. That stagnation, especially if the market declines in | size, leads to crashes and new paradigms eventually emerge. | Marxists sometimes take this to a systemic extreme, with | "peak capitalism" and derivative concepts. On the | conservative side, you'll find these ideas at the heart of | austrian business cycle theories and Schumpeter's "creative | destruction." | | The digital economy is cushioned by tremendous potential for | growth, so far. FB, for example, knows that it's not cool | anymore. They can just buy whoever is cool. | Joe8Bit wrote: | Hah, thanks! My comment was fairly blatantly stealing from | the book! | | It's so interesting from an incumbents internal POV (I saw it | a few times during my time at McKinsey) as changing an | organisations economics is often the unstoppable force that | meets the immovable object of internal politics. | | There's a really interesting ongoing example of this in the | the UK as 'attacker' banks (e.g. Monzo, Starling) challenge | the economics of incumbents. It's not quite the same, as | these attackers are removing back-end cost (e.g. branch | networks) from an already 'free' product (e.g. retail | banking) but it's meant that big banks are looking at their | balance sheets and seeing a set of gaping money pits that | will require fundamental change in their operating models to | be able to get rid of/compete with. | losvedir wrote: | I think the Go philosophy is probably healthier for an economy | overall. I can't say whether that's really what's going on here | with Cloudflare specifically, but it's an interesting way of | framing the discussion. In particular, the thing that catches my | eye is in the "Territory" section of the post, and the idea that | in Go it's not "winner take all". | | A good Go player won't necessarily beat a less good one by a lot, | but will consistently take more territory by the end. Or, as one | of my Go strategy books put it: think about a kid cutting a | brownie in half to share - they want to give themselves a bit | more, but if you're too greedy and try to take a large fraction | of it, mom won't let you and you'll end up losing out. | | I like the idea that in the economy, good ideas and good | companies win more often, in that they get the most marketshare, | but not necessarily by a lot. | steve76 wrote: | Chess player. Go. What are you? A child? Real world is not a | game. Someone steps to you, drop them, drop them fast and drop | them hard enough to bury them. What we lack is clarity, exactly | where we are and who we are dealing with. Russian businessmen | are known to launch a wave of terror in the face of | competition, car bombings that blow up post offices and police | stations. The Chinese just poisoned the world with a bioweapon | over soybean tariffs. | | My advice to Amazon would be next space launch, don't launch | one, launch a thousand. Build a monster of a launch pad on the | moon. Anyone bothers you, crash asteroids on them and kill | their entire country. | InvaderFizz wrote: | > think about a kid cutting a brownie in half to share - they | want to give themselves a bit more, but if you're too greedy | and try to take a large fraction of it, mom won't let you and | you'll end up losing out. | | We take a slightly different approach in my house. The person | that divides the treat, gets last pick. | | It's very effective at getting the closest to equal | distribution possible. | | The only time it falls apart is when I'm not particularly | worried, so I haphazardly break the cookie in half and end up | with 1/4 for myself. | SubiculumCode wrote: | Interesting article, but I have to disagree with the Chess - Go | analogy. Pieces in chess do not have a fixed point value. | "Knights are worth 3 points" is merely a heuristic that can be | moderately useful in an initial assessment of a position...but | anyone that plays chess knows that the NETWORK matters. A queen | on the wrong side of the board is worth less than a pawn about to | promote near the enemy's king; three coordinated pieces are worth | more valuable than four isolated pieces. | pwinnski wrote: | I'm not actually sure this makes the metaphor _less_ | applicable. Network and position matter for both, but the point | values in Chess serve to describe the relative value of each | piece in addition to that, while the lack of differentiation | between pieces in Go means that even _more_ attention must be | paid to the network and positions. It is not that network or | position don 't matter in Chess, but that _only_ network and | position matter in Go. | sudhirj wrote: | The article makes no mention of the Cloudflare's enterprise | networking tools, and its VPN. Cloudflare is basically in a | position to run the internet for most people to buy into it - I | have their VPN on my phone and computer, which gets my fast | access inside their network. By fronting so many of the world's | websites, a lot (maybe a majority?) of my traffic actually flows | inside Cloudflare. | | Now with Workers, R2, Durable Objects, the server side can move | to Cloudflare too. If it makes sense to move servers on the | network where the clients are, then this is where they should go. | breakingcups wrote: | That just makes it feel like a proprietary layer on top of the | internet. | | Or, to draw it further into the scale you mention, a single- | party replacement for the internet. | | Neither of these things sound like a long-term win. | sudhirj wrote: | No, they're both very short term wins for companies, which | means they might happen anyway. Cloudflare has demonstrated | ethical behaviour so far, but that's not enough to trust a | single part with the internet. | | Short of the new age web3 stuff, though, not sure what else | is a suitable alternative. Competitors to Cloudflare aren't | as common because of their gigantic moat -- imagine building | an org that builds out to hundreds of cities around the world | and partners with thousands of network companies. | breakingcups wrote: | Definitions of ethical may differ. Shielding far-right | sites, cesspits like Kiwi Farms which make it their stated | goal to drive people they don't like to suicide, criminals | like DDOS vendors, credit card fraud forums, etc. all under | the guise of being a "neutral passthrough layer third | party" feels incredibly disingenuous to me. The | aforementioned people are Cloudflare's customers and | Cloudflare hosts their content (yes, sometimes with a short | ttl, but the public IP address still terminates at their | web servers). They can not be afforded the same leeway that | actual internet exchanges are when routing traffic to bad | actors. | | So no. They may have demonstrated business-friendly | behaviour. But ethical? No. | swyx wrote: | hey author here! thanks for posting this, i guess my original | title wasn't HNbait enough huh :) | | happy to take any questions, and yes acknowledged that I dont | follow pro chess at all, keeping it in there as a reverse | shibboleth and a reminder that i'm just a rando guy on the | internet who can be wrong | agomez314 wrote: | You brought many fascinating ideas to the table with this | article. As someone who's seeing this for the first time, and | adjusting to the paradigm shift you laid out, I'm curious to | know what was the context which led you to write this article. | What sort of ideas, resources and events helped you connect the | dots and express CloudFlare's plan in this way? | swyx wrote: | thanks! I worked at Netlify and AWS before my current job at | Temporal, so: | | - I've spent quite some time thinking about how "new clouds" | compete with Amazon | | - I've seen Netlify argue (with mixed results) that its users | should not put Cloudflare in front of Netlify | | - I've had casual chats with Rita and James (mentioned in the | article) that got me really thinking about what their | strategy is. I've had "eating the cloud from outside in" | since the start of the year - the Go analogy only came that | weekend when I finally sat down to write this thing and R2 | was just freshly out. | | - I've listened closely to all of Ben Thompson's stuff | dadrian wrote: | Odd that this article suggests that Intel ignored a new | technology until it was too late in the Apple case, when the | article that they link to back that claim argues for the other | style of disruption---low-end product eventually claws up market | share and performance to compete with the high-end. | | The rest of the article seems reasonable, but IMHO and many | other's opinions is that the Intel/Apple/ARM thing is classic | disruption from the low end. | sbazerque wrote: | I'm thinking there's an interesting parallel between our browser- | based p2p project [1] and cloudflare workers / DurableObjects. | Instead of DurableObjects, we got HashedObjects [2], and instead | of workers running on an edge network somewhere, we got in- | browser p2p nodes running a browser-to-browser mesh network. | | In general, what they do with infra, we do with cryptography & | datatypes. | | [1] Hyper Hyper Space: https://www.hyperhyperspace.org | | [2] HashedObject: | https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-core/blob... | rsmets wrote: | I consider Clouflare to be the least reliable cloud service | provider out there. So many CDN and DNS related outages thanks to | poor engineering release practices. Considering those are their | bread and butter services I wouldn't ever rely on any of their | other services. | qaq wrote: | Do they have more outages than AWS or GCP? | ehPReth wrote: | Do they? | scrollaway wrote: | Cloudflare user for all my services here. I can't remember any | downtime ever outside of the couple times where they got | massive press over it (because, like, the whole internet broke) | SadWebDeveloper wrote: | Most ppl use CF for toy things they don't test if their | infrastructure is reachable at all times, but CF fails a lot, | at least twice a day. | mayli wrote: | Yeah, I admit ppl use CF for toy things, but twice a day? | sause? | gfosco wrote: | Enterprise CloudFlare customer here, can't remember a single | disruption or outage in the last year. | AtNightWeCode wrote: | It is simply incorrect. We have most of our customers on | Cloudflare and the larger customers are on enterprise deals. | My only criticism to Cloudflare is simply that it is just not | as stellar as some of the more expensive alternatives. It is | not a high end service but still the right choice for a lot | of sites. | ranman wrote: | The least reliable cloud service provider ... relative to what? | | A comparison of historical downtime amongst DNS and CDN | providers shows this to be an illogical consideration. | | I've been using cloudflare for years at both small and very | large scales. | | They have had outages yes, but again, relative to the rest of | the cloud providers they're doing just fine. | judge2020 wrote: | When it happens, it breaks a lot of the internet, but "so many" | is stretching it - the entire CF network has only gone down a | couple of times in the time I've known about them (~6 years). | hunterb123 wrote: | They went down at least 4 times last year. | | Always noticeable as Discord will go down. | ranman wrote: | Doesn't discord use GCP? | judge2020 wrote: | They extensively use Cloudflare, other than for voice | channels which don't use CF's tcp/udp proxy (to minimize | ping, since GCP is usually peered better globally). | notamy wrote: | Nitpick: Voice/video is run on dedicated hardware from | various providers, since GCP networking costs would be | obscene for that. | Jamie9912 wrote: | GCP proxied by Cloudflare, yes | [deleted] | Alex3917 wrote: | > Meanwhile, when people think of "Tier 1" AWS services, its | Cloudflare equivalent, Amazon CloudFront, rarely gets any love, | and the official AWS Twitter account hasn't tweeted about it in | almost a year. | | In the last couple years, CloudFront has gone from not really | working to actually working very well. Invalidations are now | instant, both from the command line and the CLI. You used to be | unable to customize response headers, but now you can do that | fairly easily. | | Maybe they're not publicly talking about it, but they've actually | gone and fixed all the major problems. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-18 23:00 UTC)