Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by eastdakota | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

eastdakota

Working on it. Distributed makes it… non-trivial. But if we pull off what we think we can…

View on HN

While we are asking for stuff:

Full text search, please :)

Inverted indexes are almost always eventually consistent, and easy to integrate in a distributed context.

- Store documents into R2 or Durable Objects or KV or (Cloudflare future storage).

- Create inverted index files (similar to Lucene)

- Cache the inverted index files at the edge. Cloudflare’s bread and butter.

- Run query execution nodes at the edge. Deal with the occasional cache miss by proxying to a different region.

- Its impossible to deal with relevance or ranking for that many different use cases. Let the clients control every aspect of relevancy and ranking, e.g. Similar to the flexibility of ElasticSearch.

Do GPUs at a reasonable price next and you'll own the ML space.

R2 will be amazing for hosting computer vision datasets and models.

Working on that too: https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/

Great start but the field is moving on from tensorflow. Torchscript support would be amazing.

If we can get GPUs deployed at the scale we want, adapting to whatever language or framework you want to use to program them will be easy. The challenge is getting GPUs into enough machines in enough places to make this interesting. But, again, we're working on it.

I'm not sure if the GPU for ML space is a fit for cloudflare.

It is for a cloud hoster. But ML does not take advantage of cloudflare's competitive edge ( their SDN ).

In the same way, i don't think docker containers are an interesting/good fit ( i could be wrong on this though)

Edit: i was wrong...

I have an image recognition service on GCP where majority of the latency is the initial upload. Pushing that closer to the user would be nice.

> It is for a cloud hoster.

Which is absolutely where CF are headed, as evidenced by R2.

Don’t forget that S3 was the first AWS product. It’s fitting that it’s also CF’s first real foray into cloud-land.

Well, i thought cloud hoster together with the advantage of the edge.

I thought that ai wasn't interesting on the edge.

Goddamn, extremely exciting stuff. Between this and fly.io, looks like exciting times for building distributed systems!

I hope for enterprise customers it will allow pay as you go. We were really interesting in Spectrum and the price was in our range but having a contract for our current capacity for 1 year didn’t make sense. And our needed throughputs were very spikey. It didn’t make sense to pay for 3k concurrent users when our 80th percentile would be around 1k.

RDS (PgSQL) is what keeping us on AWS, CF delivering a better alternative will trigger us into evaluating switching over.

That's amazing news. The only thing left is some kind of EC2 + ECS solution before I can shift all my AWS workloads to Cloudflare.

Already really impressed with Cloudflare Sites and planning to adopt Images soon.

You guys deliver at a dizzying pace, it's truly incredible.

They could just buy Vultr for that. I've been very happy there for 4 years.

At what point do you become a full blown hosting company and is that the goal?

They’ve built out a global network presence… it would be silly for them to not at least try. I really hope they build a cloud; AWS and GCP are the only serious players in the game but neither seem too concerned about lowering prices. It’s all about providing “managed X” and “hybrid Y” for them.

I would at least throw Azure into the serious players category. You have companies like Digital Ocean trying to compete as well, definitely not as many products though.

Honourable mention for Scaleway, too. I use their products because they just work, they're cheap, have good tf modules etc. Helps that they're in the EU.

Azure is kept afloat mostly due to the windows ecosystem. They won’t go away as long as that exists but I don’t see them growing into a significant player.

Azure is already a significant player.

Nope

They already are very much a hosting co.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com