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Comment by krn | Hacker News Reader

Am I right thinking, that there are no viable alterneratives to Cloudflare Workers on the market at the moment?

And if you decide to move from Cloudflare to another major CDN provider, you will have to change how your product works?

Because that's what StackOverflow and Reddit did. They are not using Cloudflare anymore.

So, does using Cloudflare Workers create a serious vendor lock-in, that makes changing a CDN provider much more costly in the future?

EDIT: I am thinking primarily about Fastly, as it's where the majority of large players move from Cloudflare. Also, about KeyCDN, which can be a much more cost-efficient alternative to the Cloudflare's Enterprise plan.

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Depends on what you mean. There are several 'smart' CDN offerings out there. Amazon Cloudfront Lambda's and https://fly.io/ jump immediately to mind.

I believe you'd need to port your CDN code when moving on any of those platforms though. You might get away without re-architecting anything else.

Hi! I'm from fly.io!

You can write JavaScript that runs just fine on both fly.io and Cloud Flare workers. We both target the in browser Service Worker API. We actually have a few users that deploy the same code to us + Cloud Flare, and use our runtime for local testing + CI: https://github.com/superfly/fly

Cloudflare Workers is a functions-as-a-service platform that runs on all the nodes of their CDN platform and works in the path of every request. Lambda@Edge, Stackpath, Fly.io are 3 similar options and there are dozens of single-region FaaS vendors. Fastly is working on a WebAssembly based compute environment.

CDNs are commodity so it's really the extra features that cause companies to move. With something like Workers that allow you to build whatever functionality you want, it actually reduces reasons to move in the first place. Also CF doesnt charge for bandwidth which is a unique advantage.

In this case it's more useful to think of Cloudflare as a compute platform than a CDN. There are many other places where you can take JavaScript you write to run on Cloudflare and get it running (Lambda, App Engine, your own server). It won't be globally distributed or as fast, but it could be made to run.

Have you checked out StackPath [https://StackPath.com] (I’m an employee)?

We have a serverless product that is very similar to Workers. Our global footprint can handle 65tbts and we also do distributed containers and VMs at the edge. We also don’t require users to use our DNS.

We tried our the EdgeEngine but saw major latency spikes. Competition is good but SP also charges for bandwidth and a higher charge per call which makes it unattractive for high-volume usage.

Really appreciate your feedback. I definitely want to hear more about the latency spikes, if you don't mind. Also happy to talk further on the price per request and bandwidth pricing logic.

Can you shoot me an email? ben.gabler (at) stackpath (dot) com

AWS Lambda@Edge should do most of the same thing, so it's not entirely locked-in.

You'd have to work really hard to share code between Lambda@Edge and ... anything else, unfortunately.

There are other alternatives but not as powerful yet. We are currently working on a solution for Fastly, it's early days though :) get in touch with us at Sloth and I'll let you know when it's available.

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