The article doesn't talk about Cloudflare One, but I think that is a bigger opportunity than Edge computing in the short term, given the rise in ransomware attacks targeting tech-naïve institutions forced online due to the pandemic.
Re: Edge: AWS has answers in Lambda at Edge (PoPs), Wavelength (5G Edge), and Local Zones (metro DCs); whilst Google has similar arrangements through its Anthos product line, if I'm not mistaken. Though, where Cloudflare shines is they architect their products to deploy and run from all locations around the world.
Cloudflare also positions its ("global") products as being the simplest of all cloud providers to use. We stand to see how long they can remain as simple once they start ramping up on newer product lines and eventually have to support different integration points among them.
The article points out that Matthew Prince, being a HBS graduate, quotes Clayton Christensen in his TechCrunch Disrupt Q&A; and from what little I gather, Andy Jassy comes from the same school of thought, as well [0].
I'm looking forward to more innovation from Cloudflare [1]. I've slowly moved all workloads that Cloudflare Edge could support out from AWS to it; only regret is AWS credits lay waste especially given we are pre-revenue. That said, Cloudflare's (limited) offerings are a better choice if you're a small engineering shop and couldn't be bothered with a gazillion bill items, IAM rules, and VPCs.
> "And you can manage that okay. You can manage on a per country basis. You feel good about that?
> "Sure. I mean, for us, that’s easy. And then we can provide that to our customers as a function of what we’re doing. But I think that if you could say, German rules don’t extend beyond Germany and French rules don’t extend beyond France and Chinese rules don’t extend beyond China and that you have some human rights floor that’s in there."
I'd be curious about that human rights floor. It's one thing to follow laws in a western democratic country with elections and rule of law, but it's another to do so in countries without elected governments or rule of law. It sounds like they're thinking about this since he explicitly mentioned the human rights floor, so that's good at least.
> "Right. But given the nature of the internet, isn’t that the whole problem? Because, anyone in Germany can go to any website outside of Germany.
> "That’s the way it used to be, I’m not sure that’s going to be the way it’s going to be in the future."
This makes me sad, I hope we don't end up in a highly nationalized intranet style future but it does seem like things are trending that way (unfortunately).
A highly nationalized internet is the inevitable consequence of national and supranational government orgs making demands that extend to companies or users beyond their jurisdiction. HN, disappointingly, seems to support a lot of these measures when it’s a “good guy” (like Germany or the EU) doing it to a “bad guy” (like Facebook), but seems to miss the broader implication.
If the internet is going to remain an open and fully connected global network, it’s absolutely necessary that internet entities don’t need to worry about the laws of some country halfway around the world.
The alternative is, at best, every website being IP-locked to a small set of countries. Either self-censored to countries that sites feel legally safe exposing themselves to, or censored by governments at transnational network boundaries.
This. America has acted as world policeman for decades (skylarov, Kim dot com, patriot act, dmca), now other countries are acting the same there’s outrage from the American tech community.
What website are you on? 99% of people on HN are strongly anti-DMCA, but completely fail to see why it’s bad in principle (because one country is exercising hegemonic influence over the global internet). They love the same type of thing as long as it’s introduced to screw over Facebook.
I agree that that's kind of an double standard, but copyright rules including those similar to DMCA are very widely accepted in almost all countries outside the US, too, even though not all enforce them. [1]
In a simial vein I can see myself being in favor of some basic privacy rights applicable worldwide, too.
Yes, and DMCA is terrible. I want less of this. HN constantly argues for more of this without even realizing it, because they think they’re sticking it to Facebook.
I'm in Australia. If I buy ads on Google I believe I'm actually dealing with Google Ireland, because the money goes there.
But they have servers in Australia. But their headquarters is in the US.
The EU approach (~"oh, you want to move where you measure your revenue around? Ok, we will look at global revenue") seems like a logical response to the way multinationals use corporate structure to avoid tax.
I’m not interested in arguing with you about the pedantic details of establishing legal presence. I am simply telling you the inevitable consequence of forcing any company who sends packets to a country to now follow that country’s laws: only huge companies with tons of lawyers will be able to afford it, and everything else will be siloed by country. Google is just about the only American website that you’ll be able to get in Australia.
The idea that large multinational corporations are unaccountable to sovereign entities is far more frightening than the scenario you’re putting forward.
No one elected Zuckerberg to be the global monarch. I don’t want him making the laws that govern global society.
If said company only does business in Canada i see no reason for them to be accountable to the US, Germany or China.
Why should foreign companies be entitled to enter a country and break said countries laws? Is it your position that we should do anyway with the notion of sovereignty and the rule of law all together?
> If said company only does business in Canada i see no reason for them to be accountable to the US, Germany or China.
So, to be clear, you are explicitly arguing for the case where the internet should be siloed on a country-by-country basis unless participants are willing and able to establish a legal business presence in every country they’re accessible from? That’s what “doing business” means on the internet.
> Why should foreign companies be entitled to enter a country and break said countries laws?
Sending packets over the internet isn’t “entering a country”.
The problem with this is not censorship, but corporations having reached a global scale while democracy is by and large stuck on the national level.
Being accountable to some level of democratic governance is not the bane of free speech and capitalism, it is the foundation of a truly free market that has space for newcomers to innovate and compete, as well as citizens to have their rights protected.
The national democracies have created the legal and economic infrastructure for companies to go international, it's silly to think that without that basis companies could even exist at all. They need protection by the rule of law as much as citizens. The free market is not a jungle - for an open internet for example we really need some form of net neutrality.
I think of lot of EU citizens feel we also need some form of GDPR that is actually respected, and the US is actually the problem hindering an open, fully connected internet and global network here.
Good article, I feel people don't spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff.
The gap here for me is that AWS, GCP, and the like are perfectly equipped to build infra "from the edge in" as well. It's just not an advantage for Cloudflare -- I'd actually argue that AWS has the comparative advantage in building "from the edge in" given the clip at which they can turn out datacenters.
With the new Outpost model as well, I don't see too many hurdles for AWS to just start deploying their whole feature set in any old colo, in any old country, in a matter of months. They do have to set their minds to it though. At the very least, they should definitely have their storage services in every country with actual data locality laws.
I'm sure I'm missing something, but on the infra side I don't see what Cloudflare is better at in this regard. I'd also argue that AWS storage migration is just as good or better than Cloudflare's offering here. I won't comment on how users perceive/value each service because I don't use either much.
What I definitely DO agree with, is that infra "from the edge in" is a major threat to existing public cloud business models. At the point where you have your whole stack portable from colo to colo (or, gasp, as a dAPP), it starts to sound more like public cloud as a library, rather than as a centralized managed service.
Open source communities, unbundlers, and new-age cloud companies together will have a field day building 'library' versions of common cloud services and I think Cloudflare will pair nicely at that point. The question is when that becomes a reality.
> The gap here for me is that AWS, GCP, and the like are perfectly equipped to build infra "from the edge in" as well. It's just not an advantage for Cloudflare -- I'd actually argue that AWS has the comparative advantage in building "from the edge in" given the clip at which they can turn out datacenters.
You’re clearly more versed with AWS than I am but I think that if you compare them at this level, you could argue that all the big cloud providers could easily compete with Cloudflare and crowd out their proposition.
But this possibly overlooks the (in my view) very unique execution style of a Cloudflare compared to “Big Cloud”.
I do worry about their ever growing reach across vast portions of the internet, but, I keep coming back to Cloudflare and taking up more of their feature set because they make me so damn productive, and unlike all the other cloud providers, the learning curve is very minimal and their products are a pleasure to use.
I have huge respect for AWS and Azure, and use them both for production workloads where needed, but I’m weary of their complexity and bloat. Cloudflare is an absolute breath of fresh air in comparison.
My only criticism of CF’s execution is that it can seem a bit “scatter gun” sometimes. Eg Cloudflare Registrar still doesn’t support .co.uk domains years after its launch - which somewhat undermines that offering. They sometimes launch things and then seem to neglect them and start working on something else.
To end on a bit of a tangent: the one thing I really wish they would turn their creative minds to is reinventing the whole CAPTCHA concept. Given their reliance on captcha and what an utterly fucking awful experience it is to try and identify all the buses in 9 grainy low res photos, I think it’s about time CF invented something better!
> you could argue that all the big cloud providers could easily compete with Cloudflare and crowd out their proposition.
I would definitely argue the first point here, but not the point about crowding out. You said it yourself, there's totally room for a Cloudflare to win on UX/DX, and other areas like cost. This is the strategy the CEO mentions when he's quoting Christensen, and coming up from the bottom to compete with the big dogs. It's also why AWS will make more in a day than Cloudflare does in a year though, for now..
Cloudflare was built with global deployments at the edge from the very beginning, so everything is oriented that way with them. With AWS, they do have some global services, but most are oriented regionally and encourage centralization in fewer jurisdictions.
An outpost/local_zone still has to have a home region that serves as the primary control plane IIUC, so I don't think that would be applicable here.
(That said, I think given their experience deploying to China, meeting GDPR, etc, and their focus on whatever it takes to make money, AWS and others should have no problem figuring out a solution to local regulations if that's what it ends up coming down to. That's far more likely than enterprises deciding to restructure everything they do around Cloudflare Workers, or Cloudflare becoming a full cloud platform.)
Agree, especially with the concession. "Big Cloud" is best equipped to deal with forthcoming regulations.
Outpost may be local zones today (needs fact check), but maybe a better question is what is the minimum service threshold for AWS to deploy a new "global zone". Considering data locality is the topic at-hand, I would surmise it's not that much and that Big Cloud can handily deploy new global zones at the rate that these new regulations crop up.
Totally separate topic -- but my other thought is these laws are totally at odds with the decentralization trend. Not sure how FileCoin, Sia, Storj et al are thinking about this... maybe building the decentralized storage _protocol_ is the escape hatch, but maybe not.
But it really was how we thought about what we were doing from day one. Our litmus test was always: “If we ran the Internet, would this be the right decision?” Asked that for every technical, business, and policy/legal question we faced. Seemed absurd when it was 8 of us over a nail salon in Palo Alto, but led to a lot of good decisions and long-term thinking.
I've been using Cloudflare for many many years now, I like it a lot. I like that I mostly set it up once and forgot about it.
I just found about Durable Objects and can't wait to try them on a new project for a client that has a use case like: few days per year has a huge traffic spike (tens of thousands concurrent users) while the rest of the year is pretty much dead. I think DOs could be a perfect fit for this.
Cheers and let's hope for another 10 great years, :D.
In my corner of Europe (Portugal), sites can get blocked at (ISP supplied) DNS resolution. I think it's by court order, under a law passed a few years ago. Mostly for copyright reasons, and circumventable by switching to Google or similar DNS, for those in the know - it's not the great firewall, but it does prevent "anyone" from going to "any website" right now.
The quotes at the end are excellent, they emphasize that your Microsofts and Googles of the world are going to try to throw their weight around to force the Internet to work the way works best for their business, rather than accepting a political reality, that the Internet is a communications medium, and laws are going to affect it differently in different countries, just as they do today for phone, mail, and any other medium.
Bigger companies are more compliant to the local laws than smaller companies. Simply because they have more to lose if the local government turns against them, they tread more carefully. Small companies can afford to fly under the radar just because they are small and likely catering to the fringe users and not to the masses.
> Bigger companies are more compliant to the local laws than smaller companies.
Sort of, but partly because those bigger companies are often the ones writing the laws. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. operate "public policy teams", whose goal is to push legislators to enshrine their business practices as law.
That may indeed be a factor, but it can happen even without active lobbying on the part of big business—all they need to do is sit back and let things flow. Be it in good faith or for cynical electioneering, lawmakers will introduce new regulatory requirements under the argument that they better protect the consumer or encourage a more competitive marketplace. However, the more complex these become, and the faster they change, the more it helps big business for they are the ones who can afford the legal teams and resources to keep track of them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm nowhere near an economic laissez-fair libertarian, and I believe that strong regulation is necessary in many markets and industries. However, I'm also very wary of well-meaning but overly complex rules which do little but add a huge barrier to competition against the big players.
This is trivial to fix: A lot of regulatory requirements should have a minimum size before they take effect. Such that a small player is approaching large player status before they need to worry about it.
Their local governance situation is much easier because their platform only does like two and a half things.
Once they add enough to become a full fledged cloud provider that an enterprise can lift and shift their SAP and Oracle bare metal servers and whatever else onto with guaranteed performance and availability SLAs, then they're in the same boat. Until they do that, they'll continue to be a niche player for things that fit those two and a half use cases. It's not like enterprises are going to rewrite all their enterprise apps around Workers.
I think this is just a matter of people getting tired of the self-driving cars story, and a reach for some other reason to pump up share values.
There is lots of potential. I'm working on a startup idea around Cloudflare at the moment.
Here is something that can help with Cloudflare horrible tooling: Use wasm/Rust. You'll be able to compile and run most of your code locally, and then when you deploy you have more odds of your code not bugging on the cloud.
Feels a lot like uploading PHP via FTP. The world moved on, I expect to test this stuff locally and if it breaks because of screwed up vendor tools, there better be source code.
I had a similar experience. I tried installing some of their CLI tools and was met with some undocumented errors I didn't want to bother digging through code to figure out.
> But there is definitely potential.
I agree! It's something I'm watching with eager eyes, but don't feel like is the first option I'd turn to when making a technology choice.
Another technology that gives me this feeling is FaunaDB [0].
That last bit about politics/laws is exactly where I fear the internet will be a decade or two from now. Virtual borders will be controlled by nations as strictly as physical ones. Every byte going in or out will be monitored and regulated. "Removing [xyz] from the internet" will be a matter of a government clicking a button rather than the laughable scenario it is today. And they will be assisted every step of the way by companies like Cloudflare, Amazon and Microsoft.
It would be a sad day when that happens. Internet still allows an ability for whistleblowers from ole country to be able to reach out to others. If virtual borders start getting enforced even harder than what we already have, those whistleblowers will be forever silenced.
I think people have enjoyed the Wild West of the Internet long enough for governments to want to put a stop to it proactively instead of retroactively, although I don’t think it necessarily should be done.
I'm a little more optimistic in that I think decentralized networks will disrupt all these centralized monopolies (ex: imagine a social network where you own your data and can access it through various frontends, rather than one company owning it all). Hopefully, all the rewards will also get re-distributed back to participants in the network rather than one entity.
People are starting to realize what happens when a central entity can just "cancel" you and as that keeps happening more often (ex: youtubers getting de-monetized, people getting locked out of their google accounts, Trump twitter cancellation, etc), people will be pushed to these un-censorable decentralized alternatives.
I don't quite understand the point that latency doesn't matter much outside of niche applications.
If you're using TCP, bandwidth depends on latency, and surely no one thinks bandwidth isn't important? This totally does matter in the hundreds-of-milliseconds range, you can use one of the online calculators to confirm this.
The other thing is that live video/audio isn't niche at all. Cloudflare could prioritize latency-sensitive traffic like that within its network, and deliver it as close to the users as possible on their respective ends.
While you're correct to think that latency does indeed matter, I think what the article is trying to point out is that very few services are latency sensitive beyond what is traditionally expected.
In many applications, there are certain expectations of performance around certain actions, sure. That said, if things go long the user may get annoyed but they won't be deterred. But in some cases, having anything but the highest regard for latency is not only a deterrence, it's basically completely unacceptable to the user.
Sure, you want your blog to load fast. But if your blog takes 300ms or 900ms very few people are going to notice the difference despite the 3x disparity. You're unlikely to get a nastygram on Twitter about your blog being unusable. Hell, even websites that take greater-than-one seconds to load are routinely not taken to task by the average user because, quite frankly, while fast is nice it's not a need.
But apply that to a competitive, real-time game and if your service takes 70ms RTT for one of the roughly several hundreds of thousands of commands issued to it over the course of a 20 minute span you're performing about average. At 250ms - dramatically less than the kind of latency bound available to a blog post - you're rapidly approaching "completely unplayable" and going to get nasty responses.
I think a lot of webapps undervalue low latency. I remember when Microsoft was talking about Surface research once and said that most people could start to notice latency >20ms.
I think talking about the modern web in milliseconds doesn’t represent the way it really is. Based on my experience everything is measured in seconds and UIs are awful compared to what we had 10-20 years ago.
It’s like the old green screens that adept users could outperform, but with better graphics and no buffer/command queue.
Sure, but the point is that the physical light speed delay is a tiny fraction of the typical latency problems on the Internet. It’s a rare web application that is so well-optimized that shrinking the physical wire will make a significant improvement.
If your only issue is bandwidth delay product, why would you go through all the effort of moving servers closer to the users instead of just increasing TCP transmit buffer size? You don’t even need control over the other side of the connection.
How large to you want the TCP buffer to get? Hundred-of-mbit/s to GBit/s bandwidths are normal even for consumers now, and so are delays in the hundreds of milliseconds.
How large does a TCP buffer have to be before the cost of running beefier hardware compares with deploying to tons of edge locations instead of a couple of locations on each continent? At 300ms of latency you only need 37 megabytes per 1Gbps of link capacity. I can’t imagine putting a 100Gbps link on a machine that couldn’t spare 3.7 GB of RAM without breaking a sweat. TCP window scaling (and SACK) exists for a reason.
That's a good point about window scaling solving the problem in theory.
Still, empirically, latency has a huge impact on throughput. Part of the reason might be that many transfers are actually too small to take full advantage of window scaling? Maybe there are other factors at play as well that I'm not aware of.
Check out for example this speed measurement tool from AWS [0], which shows a really drastic influence of physical distance on transfer speeds (particularly for the small files where I get >10x differences, but even at 5 MB I see >3x differences between a close-by zone and those roughly on the other side of the planet). That happens even with their "global accelerator" service which gives them a lot of control over the transfer parameters.
Cloudflare edge workers are pretty awesome for a lot of use cases. I was a bit disappointed that the article doesn’t really talk about the tech, felt like quite a lot of waffle.
It’s great for inserting data into a page, because it runs on super fast connections, and means the data is already in the page when it gets to users, there’s no waiting for the browser to fetch and hydrate data into the page, so the UX is awesome.
And security is great too because you don’t need to store any access keys in the browser, instead have these in env variables in Cloudflare.
>>> Jurisdictional Restrictions make it easy for developers to build serverless, stateful applications that not only comply with today’s regulations,
I'm interested to hear from anyone from fly.io on this - if Inunderstand it their approach is very amenable to this as well - at the simplest level all my app needs is an environment setting telling me which data centre i happen to be running in. then i can start doing whatever regulations I need to.
This is an unfortunate view, because Cloudflare is a better actor than most of their listed competitors. And the puzzles you are dealing with are merely settings that Cloudflare's customers have decided on, based on the assumption of risk based on how you choose to access the web.
Instead of pitching a fit at Cloudflare, encourage and promote positive views of Tor-based browsing, privacy-respecting browser settings, etc. There's an unfortunate reality that people want those Cloudflare settings because they stop a lot of malicious traffic, while allowing the vast majority of legitimate traffic. As we move the window of legitimate traffic to be more privacy-respecting, you'll see the boundaries of such behaviors are forced to adjust.
> Instead of pitching a fit at Cloudflare, encourage and promote positive views of Tor-based browsing
I don't know if the person to whom you are replying is using Tor, but I'm definitely not and I also despise how Cloudflare--or their customers, but I have no way of differentiating the two--reacts to various things.
My home ISP is a very small outfit that mainly serves apartment buildings in my area. I don't know why, but every three or so weeks, Cloudflare decides that my ISP is a massive pile of risk and starts shunting almost every request I make through their "analysing your browser please be patient" screen. It's nothing specific to my computer because if I flip on a tunnel through my server in a colocation service in the same city as me, I get zero prompts.
I've worked with my ISP and they've basically given me free reign to assign myself whatever public IP I want out of their /22 (as long as it's not in use by another customer, of course) and, during these times, any IP I choose gets the same response from Cloudflare.
It's the same lack of transparency and being able to say "hey, what gives" that applies to spam filtering by the big e-mail providers or getting dropped into the "scam likely" bucket for mobile phone calls. I understand the need to filter and screen and protect but that doesn't mean I have to like it when it splashes onto me.
> I've worked with my ISP and they've basically given me free reign to assign myself whatever public IP I want out of their /22
This.
If your ISP isn't keeping track of which customer is using which IP addresses and handling complaints sent to their abuse@ etc, then their /22 is likely to have poor reputation.
Bingo, same thing caught my eye. "You're saying that when you asked them to do something a spammer or criminal might want to do, they just let you? And you say their IP block has a bad reputation? Yes, quite a mystery."
[EDIT] though I'm not disputing that it would feel shitty and unfair, for a normal user, to be stuck dealing with CAPTCHAs because of that.
> If your ISP isn't keeping track of which customer is using which IP addresses and handling complaints sent to their abuse
To be clear, I am the only person (so far as I know) who has the ability to do this. Subscribers are ordinarily segmented by VLAN and the DHCP server hands out a single, predefined IP address on a /30. If a subscriber moves between apartments, their IP goes with them (the VLAN is simply relocated to the new physical port in the new apartment). Which customer has which IP in which apartment is all documented in their customer management system.
What they've permitted me to do, as part of testing, is to manually assign myself an IP by removing the VLAN and DHCP restriction on my specific port. If I try to this same stunt in a friend's apartment, on the same ISP, it does not work.
Is it really that complicated? Someone else on your ISP is almost definitely sending abusive traffic and it gets your ISP greylisted. Instead of blaming cloudflare you could instead get your ISP to proactively block / ban abusers.
How do you monitor this in a privacy-respecting manner? Frankly, with HTTPS, how do you monitor this even at all? There's no way as an ISP to tell benign from malicious HTTPS traffic?
Does Cloudflare provide something to say "Is my IP considered malicious?" and a way to ask/appeal about any bans?
I am not with Cloudflare, but I'd guess something about traffic from your ISP is causing Cloudflare to be uncomfortable with it. Presumably your ISP could discuss it with Cloudflare?
They claim that they have done so, and that they can't locate any suspicious traffic coming from their network. Of course, these claims might be BS and I've no way to prove or disprove it...
Because Cloudflare for no clear reason allows them to require captchas for pages that are cached anyway and thus where DoS is not a problem, and also in cases where the website is not actively being DoSed at that moment.
[of course captchas do nothing against targeted attacks]
Consider trying out PrivacyPass (1) which does some fancy cryptography to limit the number of captchas you have to do while preserving privacy. Unfortunately there does not seem to be any ideal solution for dealing with the legions of bots on the web.
Time flies and we are all here for only so long. Yet, cloudflare thinks taking "up to 5 seconds" of my life is completely fine. It's a damn time vampire.
Unless your website is small or uncontroversial, malicious traffic is a very real issue. For many webmasters it's a critical issue. Now consider that, from a webmaster's perspective, the more anonymous you are, the harder it is for us to distinguish you from this torrent of malicious traffic.
I run a fairly decent sized website (perhaps not as big as Hacker News but comparable in scope and magnitude) and I'm frequently analysing traffic samples to determine ways to profile abusive behaviour. Traffic from TOR is usually in excess of 95% robotic and malicious. For me it's just a waste of time to allow any of it. (But I do, so long as your browser already has a valid authentication cookie generated outside of TOR.)
Amazon and Google own about half of the market. To criticize Cloudflare for re-centralization would require that we are decentralized in the first place.
Personally, my experience with Cloudflare's edge products so far has been amazing. I've had a free CDN with free SSL certs on every website I've made for the last 5 years. When I started using Workers I hit a mildly troublesome scenario so I opened a PR and they quickly thanked me and merged it. The usage limits for only $5/mo are genuinely unparalleled; they have by far the lowest and most transparent pricing of any similar service, at least for my use cases.
Delivering sites faster to users seems to help the world.
Reducing bandwidth costs and increase site speed seems to be helpful for their direct customers.
Your conclusion only seems to follow if you firmly believe that (internet) centralization is always bad. That's a nuanced topic, but by no means does everyone agree with it.
(Also, your last 3 sentences are very ranty and don't add to the conversation - are you doing ok today?)
Seriously? So the idea that they provide some good outweighs their history of shitty behavior and their desire to re-centralize and become a monopoly?
If what I wrote seems ranty, it might be because you haven't heard of their shitty behavior. Here's something I wrote, but I'm certainly not alone in not being happy with what Cloudflare tries to do:
My point was to inject some nuance so we could discuss the tradeoffs, rather than your one-sided comment that is a conversation ender. At no point did I attempt to balance the scales to reduce the situation to a good/bad emotional response. It appears that is your objective, which isn't a very interesting way to spend time. Have a nice day.
You say, "but they do good things". I write back with a link to a list of evil things they've done and are doing, and you don't address that one tiny bit.
So you want to say they're wonderful, but can't talk about what they're doing wrong. I want to say they're horrible, and at least I've provided content.
Introducing nuance? Sure... More like another example of pro-Cloudflare fanboism.
Boycotting centralized stuff because it's more efficient isn't going to work, so if you want to avoid the Cloudflarepocalypse you need to work on making decentralized systems competitive.
Yeah, but it's still a rather awesome product offering. I wish the US government would put as much effort into mass transit as they have with project Cloudflare.
I mean they kind of do at-least for free? What is your alternative so linking to a site from this site doesn't crash it without spending a good bit more money than needed every month?
Cloudflare slipped too far into censorship to support them any further. I used to promote their service to customers but no longer. The last thing I want to power the Internet is a persobality driven agenda for censorship.
8chan was not carrying out and filming executions. ISIS was, probably still is, if you want to talk about disingenuous. You probably knew that. I submit that there's a slight difference.
I would say despite feeling a bit of sadness that deplatforming is the thing that it is today, that it's hard to really blame any company for it these days.
We are in a hyper-political environment, where your company is going to be judged by one group or another for any action or inaction. So if you're protecting far right nuts, your left side is going to drop you. In a very real sense, protecting 8chan or Daily Stormer is a company deciding to solely make itself palatable to supporters of those sites, at the expense of basically... all your other customers.
No company that wants to be successful is going to stand in defense of a customer or two that's known as a source of terrorism and violence.
Cloudflare is the only Internet companies that actually talks about Rule of Law in way Freedom of Speech and politics should be played, rather than some arbitrary company TOS.
Given that Prince studied law in Harvard he is way more knowledgeable and aware than average CEO.
I'm very much against the big tech (Twitter, Facebook, Google et al) suppression of/bias against pro-Trump and other conservative voices, but Cloudflare seems pretty good on that front comparatively - 8Chan and StormFront were booted (good!) but Gab and Parler etc were allowed despite heavy pressure from the usual suspects, which seems like quite a brave move in these self-righteous McCarthyite times.
Who are you thinking of when you talk about censorship?
Re: Edge: AWS has answers in Lambda at Edge (PoPs), Wavelength (5G Edge), and Local Zones (metro DCs); whilst Google has similar arrangements through its Anthos product line, if I'm not mistaken. Though, where Cloudflare shines is they architect their products to deploy and run from all locations around the world.
Cloudflare also positions its ("global") products as being the simplest of all cloud providers to use. We stand to see how long they can remain as simple once they start ramping up on newer product lines and eventually have to support different integration points among them.
The article points out that Matthew Prince, being a HBS graduate, quotes Clayton Christensen in his TechCrunch Disrupt Q&A; and from what little I gather, Andy Jassy comes from the same school of thought, as well [0].
I'm looking forward to more innovation from Cloudflare [1]. I've slowly moved all workloads that Cloudflare Edge could support out from AWS to it; only regret is AWS credits lay waste especially given we are pre-revenue. That said, Cloudflare's (limited) offerings are a better choice if you're a small engineering shop and couldn't be bothered with a gazillion bill items, IAM rules, and VPCs.
[0] https://archive.is/tBpsj
[1] ...and new-age cloud computing companies like railway.app, replit.com, darklang.com, stackpath.com, deno.land, vercel.com, fly.io to name a few.