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- Hacker News
- > Examples? Ok -> Let us look at data storage.
> They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive to speed up external Postgres or MySQL.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see this as confusing:
- D1 is SQLite on cloud, their go-to relational database
- Durable object is the cousin of durable execution (via actor model instead of saga)
- KV is for caching like Redis (sub-ms read latency)
- R2 is S3, R2 SQL is Iceberg + Athena (for OLAP queries)
- Queue is SQS
- Hyperdrive is bridge to allow CF worker to use native Postgres/MySQL driver (since v8 isolate cannot maintain persistent connection)
I've built some stuff on top of CF, and the data ecosystem is actually useful.
by hasyimibhar - It sounds like a blog post in support of a slowdown for product releases. But the reality is there are multiple companies trying to capture the attention of the same market.
Maybe 2 years ago it would’ve been acceptable to release the product internally, slowly add features, dogfood it, then open to public a year later. But now someone else will release the same product within a month, get sticky customers, and most likely won’t switch.
It’s much easier and faster to release features, so once anyone sees a competition gaining some attention, they just copy the same feature. Which, i think, is fair.
It’s easy to blame the org, but the market is extremely competitive right now. Kind of race to the bottom, except the hardware parts, which have different constraints right now.
by tokioyoyo - Hi, I wrote the post, I think blaming the org for releasing things that aren't engineered/created with "love" (including docs, examples, long-term planning and a roadmap of improvement that will follow-on), and suitable for production, without labeling them as beta, is in fact detrimental to the status of a company's image.by orliesaurus
- Great read. Exact pinpointing of my feelings about CF lately.by decide1000
- I have to say: Yes, there is a lot of velocity from Cloudflare pushing out AI-adjacent features as of late.
But also: What they've doing with Workers et al. has made them a platform for fully-fledged apps and deployments. I personally love the ecosystem and use it for all of my projects now. It's like the perfect blend of ease-of-use and DX of Heroku, and breadth of services of AWS / GCP. Well, maybe not quite AWS or GCP, but that's kind of the point -- they've created an opinionated system of "objects" that are all highly extensible to the point where in my opinion you can pretty much deploy anything you want on it.
It took me a bit of time to learn the "Cloudflare way" of doing things, but once I started making on it I saw just how flexible (and low cost!) everything is.
by sarreph - For an article that claims to know Cloudflare, I don't think he does.
Cloudflare build from the bottom up. First the SDN ( Software Defined Network), then the products on top. The first one was logical: CDN + DDOS.
All the rest continued to build on top of the SDN - Workers, D1, ... But once they have the full stack ( which happened arround D1), it was time to let others build on top of Cloudflare.
That's the current stage ( Cloud 2.0), that was always the goal. It's even in their ticker ( NET ).
In practise, AI could be a godsend. A total new foundation for software where the Cloudflare stack is a perfect product fit( disposable compute, where others will protect their compute with long running compute contracts). I can't blame them to try to seize the opportunity.
Tbh. I feels like the author hasn't actually adjusted to how Cloudflare is building it's cloud ( eg. how powerfull Durable Objects is).
PS. A big outage is a long time ago... ( we use them, I remember the issues those days and the post mortem, a lot became more stable as far as I noticed).
by NicoJuicy - Hey everyone, author here, I am very frustrated with the state of Cloudflare and I posted this blog the other day on my blog and here on HN (but generated no discussion), thanks for re-posting it, I am gonna start reading the comments and start replyingby orliesaurus
- I think like with most large companies that still ship new stuff:
it gets a bit more complex for customers to figure out what the good nuggets are and what to ignore for now
same @ google, aws and so on
(I usually rely on opinions of people i trust to find the 'javascript — the good parts' version of large offerings)
the other extreme would be not to try and ship new stuff which is also risky
difficult to find a balance and probably a good idea to over-index on momentum and new stuff
while investing enough in hardening and improving the stuff that sticks
by tosh - I also noticed the ui/ux of cloudflare got way better in the last weeks.
That's a good sign.
Usually ui/ux in large companies gets worse not better!
by tosh - A good point made in the post (that's not really specific to CF) is the problem with multiplying features. It's interesting that most of the extremely-hot-on-AI companies and leaders I know are hyped about 100x product dev, etc and want to throw tons of new assorted features out. This is not a good thing!
I've been at companies with lots of staffing and velocity (pre-AI), and it is a huge foot-gun to think pumping out features is automatically a good thing. Most paying customers do not want this from SaaS type companies.
Smaller companies especially should calm down and do one thing well, and unfortunately AI dev does not encourage that.
by gedy - > Smaller companies especially should calm down and do one thing well
They're going to get absolutely steamrolled unless it is a high risk critical industry.
by esseph - I don't know where this person got the idea that a company "run by engineers" would result in good products. Engineers don't always care about the end result. I've seen engineers completely compromise the utility and experience of the product to make their own job easier or more fun. If it "sounds logical", they assume it's good and don't ask more questions about how it will impact users.
Would you hire a mechanical engineer to run a car company? The mechanical engineer cares if the transmission is highly efficient; they don't care if the seats are comfortable, or if the car can fit standard wheels/tires. Those are the things the car's user cares about. They expect the transmission to be efficient, but they equally expect it to be comfortable and compatible.
"Infrastructure" isn't a raw mechanical component. It's a product with an entire "life" outside the technical. How it's controlled by a user, its responsiveness and intuitiveness, how they (and 3rd parties) interface with it, its operational and failure modes, its outputs and inputs... all of that's separate from the internal workings.
It's the difference between a car having a door, and having a door that fits perfectly, opens with ease, and closes with no effort, gaps or seams. A ton of extra work is required to make that happen. Making the door is easy; making it fit well is much harder.
Putting a nerd in charge will not fix the focus on the end result. You need to put people in charge who are obsessed with the customer's experience. Say what you will about Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, they at least got that right.
by 0xbadcafebee - take astral, planetscale.... Pi even - so many good orgs where the product is the result of engineering passionby orliesaurus
- Hard disagree. Sure their docs are bad, and it's sometimes buggy. But to me cloudflare is actually innovating and trying to offer "new" infrastructure. Durable objects and workers are super cool. R2 has free egress, isn't it insane that they could pull that off?
If what you want is a VM to run postgres then there are other offerings that would be much better.
Not saying they aren't evil though, they probably are, but the infra stuff is cool.
by aleda145 - They have cool tech but they can't do product, like most of big tech.
Have you tried wrangler? holy
Hire enough product owners and that's what happens.
That's why they need to buy startups every once and then, to bring some good bacteria in their messed up corporate gut.
- I disagree with your disagreement. I wrote the post and I am not blaming the innovation. I am blaming the chaos of innovation. Everything feels DISJOINTED.
The innovation is useful, the delivery of the innovation is the pitfall here.
by orliesaurus - What’s missed from the post is that Cloudflare for many years now has felt that they are a “Cloud 2.0” company.
And AWS/GCP/etc are “Cloud 1.0”.
They believe that AI Agent will fundamentally change the internet, and it’s hard to fault them for seeing it that way when their own stats shows that bot/agents account for the majority of Internet traffic.
As such, going all in on AI fits into their thesis of being “Cloud 2.0”.
by alberth - > There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better
There wasn't. Cloudflare is a cancer grown too big. And it was always positioned to become one, the middleman between users and the Internet.
It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries?
by reisse - Is Anubis kinder to non-standard tools?by nunez
- I don't have Chrome or even any Chrome-like browsers installed, but never have a problem.by drcongo
- > What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries?
I would take it off of my site
- Being signed into Google doesn't really figure into Cloudflare's systems at all, haven't for years. They replaced ReCaptcha ages ago.by bulder
- >> made the internet better
One of the measures of "making The Internet" could be looking at RFC contributions:
by majke - Genuine good faith question, what would you recommend the solution or alternative to be? How could we be able to get the benefits Cloudflare provides, without the inherent drawbacks?by jc_811
- >It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries?
If it's painful, that's not because of cloudflare. You can get past turnstile challenges using tor browser in a VM. You still might be blocked because of policies set by site owners, but that can hardly be blamed on cloudflare.
by gruez