[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.
        
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       (page generated 2021-10-18 23:00 UTC)