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Come on, throw their competitor under the bus!

I'm guessing it was Akamai. Every change we need to make to our Akamai distros is an up sell conversation with them. It's obnoxious. I much prefer Amazon CloudFront.

Not Akamai but similar experience here. I've heard good things about CloudFront, but I believe it's mostly on the CDN side? Does it do things like authenticated origin pulls (client cert from provider presented to your origin), automatic SSL certs, health checks w/ failover, DDoS and WAF protection and unlimited bandwidth?

The WAF was one of the reasons we switched, our existing provider wanted to charge us 10x more just for the WAF than the entire Cloudflare plan is now.

Fastly?

I'm also rather interested to know if it is Fastly, I am considering switching away from them. The control fastly offer through the VCL is great but cloudflare workers look really great.

Resources on how to switch from VCL to Cloudflare Workers: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/archive/recipes/vc...

Akamai interface is like a jigsaw puzzle with several key pieces missing. Doesn't matter how much effort you put into it, how many times you did it before or how many documentation you read, part of it will still depend on evil incantation chanted to their support/billing people.

At least it was about 5 years ago when I last used it, I ran from that as fast as I could.

It's still like that and everything you might want to do is disabled by default. You have to go through a sales/contract process to get each feature turned on inidividually.

They should just set the price for each feature and charge us based on usage. We're actively migrating to CloudFront because we're sick of playing these games.

"it shows to me that they are willing to consider bold moves and that they aren’t afraid to be different"

Because they benchmarked a drop-in-place commodity replacement as being a better performance-per-dollar for their operation? I'm not sure what's bold about that. I find the notion that they posted a blog entry about this pretty bizarre -- almost rinky-dink. It seems like it's pandering to the AMD fanbase (which I am right now, just as anyone who is paying attention is, but I can still recognize it)

EDIT: Sorry, I didn't realize I stepped into a Cloudflare circlejerk. Apologies and carry on. So brave!

There's a ton, just a ton of intel-specific integrations and Cloudflare's switch to AMD was not just a "drop-in-place" move.

What "intel-specific integrations"? Cloudflare specifically talks about how they keep their stack runnable across a wide-range of platforms, including even entirely different instruction sets (e.g. ARM). Their own words support my statement.

I'm pretty sure it was a "drop-in place" move, and they say absolutely nothing to the contrary. They benchmarked a system that performed better than their existing system for whatever criteria they targeted, and chose it. Story at 11. Saying they "abandoned" Intel is uproarious given that if Intel pushes out a new 128-core Xeon at a decent price, they'd as easily "abandon" AMD for Intel.

As I say in another comment... AMD makes sense for us today because of the performance per watt. We continue to keep our software ARM-ready and look at ARM-based solutions. We also continue to look at Intel. We'll use what gives us the best requests per watt.

But it is notable that these are our first servers wit NO Intel components at all.

Don't mean to hijack, but I'm definitely curious.

Since you're the CTO of Cloudflare, and you posted the OP; Why did you replace the word 'Chose', in the linked title, with the word 'abandoned' here?

That comes across as real click-baity.

I'm curious why requests per watt is an important metric?

Are you running up against some sort of heat limit or optimizing for electricity cost?

Seems like requests per amortized dollar all in would make more sense. Or requests per cubic foot of data center space if that is your limitation.

This is a good question and I would like to learn the answer too.

According to some napkin calculations, the CPU is $5000 and will be kept in service, I guess, 5 years.

The US average price is 13 cents / kWh so this 225 watts CPU will cost $1280 in electricity over those 5 years.

Colocation price is probably low, let's say $50 / 1U server / month. So that's another $3000.

Why is electricity the most important here? I guess because you can't lower the other 2 costs very much? But isn't the CPU price itself based on the power savings it does provide?

Data center space is generally plentiful. Power and cooling, which for most purposes can be considered equivalent, are the scarce resource.

CloudFlare is trading half their server density[0] for a ~25% gain in performance-per-watt and performance-per-node[1]. Power is the whole ball-game at scale.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-tour-inside-cloudflares-g9-ser...

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/an-epyc-trip-to-rome-amd-is-clou...

Ah, so it's not about power being a big expense, but being a constraint that is limiting their growth:

> We are constrained by the data centers’ power infrastructure which, along with our selected power distribution units, leads us to power cap for each server rack.

intel-specific? I thought AMD was just a drop in replacement for Intel since both same architecture and AMD was a clone of X86 originally, but I guess Intel licensed them the tech so they wouldn't be a monopoloy... but I know that's a bit of a history lesson.

Or did you confuse ARM and AMD? ARM I know you need to recompile your code but possibly other changes depending on what... and I believe there's even compatibility difference between ARM chip versions like 6 and 7, etc. but I guess that's why Apple created bitcode to try to help with that.

Oh, have you ever worked at a traditional tech company? Bureaucracy, contracts, silly guidelines often lead to very stifled vendor lock in. Even if the whole tech department says. "hey we should go AMD" giving every manager involved enough time to make themselves important over the issue can cost you half a decade.

At a pure tech company, moves across architectures and platforms is an absolute non-story unless the company is broken: Choose and implement hardware to achieve desired goals at the right price points. Reassess as the industry changes.

That service you are talking to might be running on a Xeon Windows Server instance on vmware, or a Neoverse N1 Linux instance over KVM. Whatever was right. Cloudflare specifically say that they try to operate this way, and probably have since day, as does any competent tech company.

It's more the tech-as-a-cost-center company that has such restrictions. The accounting shop or traditional bank where "We use X, Y and Z! We're an Intel and Dell company!", where the desktops are all running Windows 7.

We should maybe define pure and traditional better, but yes, I was mostly thinking companies which (heavily) rely on tech, but more as a commodity driving their actual business, and never tried to push the tech to its limits.

Incapsula?