AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go
swyx.io
swyx.io
The challenge for AWS is one lots of incumbents have experienced: they created a market and it's economics and now they're being attacked by the next generation of market entrants who've structured their businesses to _specifically_ attack those economics.
What's interesting is that challenge can be a really big problem for incumbents, as those economics can form a core (very rigid) part of their operating model; it can make it VERY hard to address without fundamental (read: risky) change to a business. There aren't many examples of incumbent businesses doing it successfully, as it needs a kind of 'self-inflicted disruption' that's very hard to do in large organisations where politics and empire building can make it difficult.
If someone could do Managed NAT Gateway next I'd appreciate it!
https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan...
It's so interesting from an incumbents internal POV (I saw it a few times during my time at McKinsey) as changing an organisations economics is often the unstoppable force that meets the immovable object of internal politics.
There's a really interesting ongoing example of this in the the UK as 'attacker' banks (e.g. Monzo, Starling) challenge the economics of incumbents. It's not quite the same, as these attackers are removing back-end cost (e.g. branch networks) from an already 'free' product (e.g. retail banking) but it's meant that big banks are looking at their balance sheets and seeing a set of gaping money pits that will require fundamental change in their operating models to be able to get rid of/compete with.
Think of the old auto companies over the years. They start off making tractor-like cars. They survive through the cars-as-fashion eras, the internationalisation of manufacturing, etc. If old auto companies emerging from the 80s were new, we'd call it disruptive innovation.
That said, both disruption and innovator's dilemma are real.
The innovator dilemmas also roughly corresponds to stuff early economists wrote about. Peak markets. Markets are great as they grow. When they reach their terminal size (eg most people already own cars), profits go down, stagnation can occur. That stagnation, especially if the market declines in size, leads to crashes and new paradigms eventually emerge. Marxists sometimes take this to a systemic extreme, with "peak capitalism" and derivative concepts. On the conservative side, you'll find these ideas at the heart of austrian business cycle theories and Schumpeter's "creative destruction."
The digital economy is cushioned by tremendous potential for growth, so far. FB, for example, knows that it's not cool anymore. They can just buy whoever is cool.
Only CEOs. Which are mostly stuck with politics. Founders tends to have it easier. But that is assuming they see it coming.
Now IRC is dead. Who gets the last laugh, huh?!
Google had no overarching chat strategy, just threw gobs of money and different teams at reinventing different spokes of the wheels, never thinking about the cart as a whole.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Also: please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We're trying for a different sort of site here.
Chat history matter a lot, really.
That's because of the the entirely different business model of the disc rental business (first sale doctrine) vs streaming licensing business (you're screwed, the content owners will squeeze you to the wall). The horrible licensing costs of the streaming business is what prompted Netflix to push into production (basically direct those fees equivalent into assets they'd own outright instead of paying all their revenue back out to licensing fees forever).
The horrible streaming licensing cost problem is why Spotify struggles to earn a decent profit despite how much they've grown and having a zillion subscribers. You get no benefit of scale on your margin, because the content owners always squeeze you as you grow.
Spotify is up to $8.6b in revenue and still losing money. Their business has no margin at all, and that's essentially all due to the music licensing costs. That's why they're desperate to push into anything else, other lines of business, where they can not have to pay all their revenue out in licensing fees.
Netflix streaming killed Netflix DVDs-by-mail.
Azure-cross-platform-support-is-king is sort-of killing Windows-only-tools.
It's still super hard to do, but every CEO post-2000 has read the innovator's dilemma and you can see that in their actions.
I can see a long term strategy where the next unicorn starts on CF and eventually pays them money. But it also feels like the big fish will migrate to AWS leaving CF with the cheap clients.
Their other stuff is where you want to be in business. Market leading technology that you can charge a premium for.
Yes please! Such a useful networking tool, but so expensive to run as a managed service.
Yes, you can run your own EC2 instance (searching turned up this guide, which looks useful: http://evertrue.github.io/blog/2015/07/06/the-right-way-to-s... ) but it'd be great to have this run by a cloud provider, yet be affordable.
I'd love to hear more about what problems you're trying to solve/features you'd like to see besides "cheaper" — can you email me at rustam at cloudflare ?
AWS can only have a single NAT gateway per subnet/availability zone(they are usually added in the route table as 0.0.0.0/0). Nat GWs can only scale up so much. If we blow past the limits, then the only option is to use resources from a different subnet. I realize things cannot scale vertically forever, but the fact that one can scale horizontally (by adding more NAT GWs in different subnets) tells me that there could be an architecture that would make this a non-issue to customers.
Also if a NAT Gateway has issues (see the outage on Aug 31st) we, the customers, have to figure out how to route around it.
In Google Cloud you can (easily) add multiple NAT gateways as your requirements grow, while staying in the same subnet. Not sure how far one can go (didn't go past 20 Nat GWs or so). We still have to worry about that (specially since in GCP the number of allowed connections is much smaller), ideally we shouldn't have to worry about this either :)
Azure does not have the same concept because they are bonkers (outgoing traffic goes out of your load balancer (?!))
https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/1393
Basically, providing a static IP to some EC2 instance traffic so that folks can add an IP to their firewall.
If you have single EC2 instance doing the job of a managed NAT, another equivalent EC2 instance is enough to max it out.
You may need a fleet of instances if your requirements are large. Which means that you have a bunch of operational aspects to worry about and the NAT Gateway calculation starts to become more palatable (once you start adding the human cost of maintaining your own, etc).
Pricing is still outrageous though. AWS has economies of scale that we don't.
Absolutely. This exactly what Tesla has been doing with car industry incumbents. For example, the higher specs versions of the Model 3 beat +$100k cars in acceleration, raw power, torque, handling, etc.
Incumbents have been selling performance as a high-ticket price feature for decades. Traditional brands cannot compete on high-performance features against Tesla without cannibalizing their ICE offering.
Has there been any follow ups on the Cybertruck recently? So far it seems like vaporware.
I wonder if the Cybertruck in current form makes it to market if Rivian and Ford have a lot of success.
I expect it will sell like any other Tesla as soon as people get to try it in real life.
Tesla will sell every Cybertruck they can make as fast as they can make them.
Tesla still doesn’t sell that many cars overall per quarter. But they can’t keep up with their demand.
Ford will not be able to sell many electric F-150s because they won’t have the batteries to do it
Ford's most recent profits were a startlingly middle-of-the-road $19.934bn.
The Cybertruck is going to sell to nerds who think they're a handyman, but the eF150 is going to sell like crazy, and Ford has the money to buy up capacity that Tesla can't really match up.
Much of the mechanicals of handling well still have to be pretty complex even with electric power.
I know that most car enthusiasts dismiss Teslas as straight-line acceleration novelty cars, but Tesla is clearly not going after Porsches 718 market. They are going after the German Sedan market where performance has been always their upsell for higher prices (think M-Series or AMG)
The German Sedan market has something Tesla does not nor it will in next 10 years or longer - the build quality. They are just laughingly bad comparing to German trio, in every assembly/build aspect. Once they reach somewhat comparable level of quality (and that's a big if), the trio will have well established EV offering
Eh? German cars are renowned in my country for becoming giant money pits once they're 4 - 6 years old.
They break down a lot and are moneypits. Part of the problem is the heavy reliance on plastics that break down with wear, therefore modern German sedans are much less reliable than they used to be.
Another problem is the extreme complexity which also translates to poor reliability.
Another is the high prices of parts. A battery replacement on a BMW costs $300 because the computer system needs to be reprogrammed. A Mercedes fuel pump assembly runs $600 (for a Camry it's $200-300). An Audi headlight assembly is $1100 (for a Camry, it's $250). These are OEM prices.
The high maintenance costs are capitalized as depreciation and are reflected in the resale value.
In my zip code, the private party sale value (accoring to KBB) of a 2012 Honda Accord SE in Good condition with 120K miles is $7K (median). For a 2012 Audi A4 with the same miles and condition, it's $4.8K - basically one of these tricked out new macbook pros with the M1 max chip.
A 2017 Audi A4 with 60K miles sells for 20K - it loses half its value. The 2017 Honda Accord sells for 19K. So it overtakes the A4 in value in year 6.
None of the above is a prediction that an out of warranty Tesla wont also be considered a money pit. Maybe it will -- we don't really have the reliability data yet, and there isn't a robust network of independent repair shops yet, it's all very new. But the German sedans do not constitute a high bar to surpass, the Japanese sedans do.
Yes, maybe they were planned to break down, but you can understand that for the end user, it certainly doesn't appear like a system with high build-quality.
But ignoring that point, yes, the drive-train is excellent. German engines and transmissions are first-rate. However counting on that as giving you an advantage in the world of electric vehicles doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
The heavy battery is a disadvantage for handling because heavier things have more inertia. The physics are pretty complicated and I'm not an expert either but if pressed I would point to aerodynamic downforce as completely independent of weight.
AWS has nothing to fear making 45 billion last year.
Yes they did, but they also reportedly have a 30%+ net margin. How is it surprising that other players who are in the position to do so, will attack them on price? While of course offering full API compatibility, which is what challengers have to do.
Do we need board game analogies to explain that some components of AWS are going to get commoditized?
The response from AWS will be innovation.
Enter Cloudflare.
Early on, optimizations are everywhere which allow you to pick the low hanging fruit. Ideally, this gets passed onto the consumer.
However, over time, the optimizations become more costly to develop and less of them exist.
Just the other day I got a notification from GCP about new Spot Instances driving prices down by 80% which exceeds their existing preemtible instances.
Similarly with AWS releasing Graviton instances offering better performance and cheaper pricing.
I think egress fees have always been the catch, and I don't think they've seen much price changes over time. So I am excited to see it, but I wonder how much of that is due to the current one directional nature of cloud migration.
Most people are moving to a single cloud. As a result, there probably hasn't been a ton of demand to negotiate the outbound movement. We can debate the merits of the lock in nature, but I don't think that technological improvements really help here. This is just a decision to charge for bandwidth or not.
Can you think of any that have? I'd be interested to see any counter examples
I think this statement resonates with me the most - it feels a lot like how I prefer to design systems (ahem, thanks Unix!): simple pieces or types, chained together into systems that are easy to understand, maintain, and scale.
We're still only using Cloudflare's workers and it's integration with caching, but it's getting close to the point where I'd have enough primitives to ship some of the functionality of our system architecture to Cloudflare and gain a net-win for latency and simplicity.
Actually AWS also "tend toward introducing singular primitives, stuff them in a box, and try to ship those boxes to as many places as will possibly take them."
It's just that AWS covers such a larger terrotery, that they appear fragmented.
This is why I now almost don't read this type of macro-analysis articles. They themselves lack the overall birds-eye view, because they are usually produced by people with little concrete technical background.
They often is very good at producing analogy, which is very intuitive, but very easily breakdown after moderate amount of details.
Contrary to what the article claims, draws in chess are very common (on the other hand, they're exceedingly rare in Go, and often impossible due to fractional komi).
Sente in Go does correspond to having the initiative, but a move that compels a player into a particular follow-up move should be called a "kikashi" (forcing move).
But anecdotally, I once messed around with a bunch of large datasets for the purpose of comparing high-level play to lower ones, and the statistics weren't spectacularly different. Yes, the results are essentially far more random the lower you go (especially below 1800, where play is essentially a lot less accurate), but draws are still fairly common at the 1600 level. If memory serves, top-level games had around two-thirds end in a draw, while at the 1600 level, it was basically down to one third. Not what I would call uncommon, though certainly no longer the dominant result.
Anecdotally, I'm rated ~1700 and only 2% of my games were drawn, and most of those were stalemates.
The exceptions are non-fractional komi, and the exceedingly rare triple ko, which does not technically cause a draw, just an infinite game. Which is generally resolved as a 'draw' by mutual agreement. There are interesting rule variants to exclude the option of infinite games, but they have weird side-effects.
I'd feel confident saying that normal go (19x19 japanese rules with 6.5 komi) does not have draws.
> A player whose moves compel the opponent to respond in a local position is said to have sente (先手), meaning they player has the initiative; the opponent is said to have gote (後手). Sente means 'preceding move' (lit: 'before hand'), whereas gote means 'succeeding move' (lit: after hand').
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms#Kikashi
> Unlike sente, though, a move is kikashi when it yields a high efficiency in play by forcing the opponent to abandon a course of action.
Kikashi seems rather techincal and quite narrow in where it can be applied.
Games can be voided due to a complex ko or superko.
There are modern rulesets with non-fractional komi such as the Ing rules (komi = 8.0) where jigo is possible. But under those rules, in the case of jigo, black wins... making komi effectively the same as 7.5.
For multiple games (e.g.: jubango), a draw can be declared if both players win the same number of games.
Think about it, the huge influx of web developers that have been growing up on just using JS. Look at their docs too. It's all very accessible, modern, low friction stuff all while they are selling us their infrastructure. And they communicate in a technical, programmer friendly way as opposed to the business/marketing jargon that we are used to by some of the others.
But saying that, I love when companies push the boundaries and CloudFlare are doing that. Conforming to the norms is just becoming another boring IBM like machine.
I feel like they're the only cloud company that's been doing any real innovation for the last 5-10 years, and in a very approachable and affordable way.
What's un-slick about them?
I don’t understand your argument. A relatively small but innovative company is working to provide competition against the big 3 cloud providers … and you cringe?
Even if their service turns out to be more or less a S3 replicate with better pricing (for some applications involving a fixed amount of data that needs to be widely distributed) it’s a win for consumers and innovation
But two years from now CloudFlare could be doing the exact same stuff Amazon is doing now, and customers are locked in again, because no source code.
The thing that keeps people locked into s3 are egress/bandwidth cost. Until Cloudflare came along, no hosted object store (Google,Azure, including self hosted HDFS onprem or in the cloud) had economical bandwidth/egress costs.
Like if Facebook went full open-source... how does that help, if they retain sole custodianship of my data?
I hear this argument often but it always rings hollow.
A friend had a first gen iPod – when he wanted to switch, he discovered that the music he bought on iTunes couldn't be moved anywhere else because of DRM. That's lock in.
But this morning I was looking at the source code of an app built against the Serverless framework[1] and what I'm seeing is a bog standard WSGI application that uses a library to transform the inbound AWS "proprietary bits" into WSGI[2]. I'm not worried about lock-in there because all API Gateway + Lambda do is "translate an HTTP request into a JSON object and toss it to an app"[3] – what source code am I missing? The underlying Lambda/APIGW code? OK, but do I need it to run it myself? Not really.
Many – most? – AWS products tend towards this analysis. S3 is so locked in that, what, we now have multiple very high quality alternatives that are API compatible?
The real risk of cloud vendor lock in, from where I sit, comes from egregious pricing models that make it cheap to get data in & expensive to push data out. But I'm not sure Cloudflare has the juice to make this play work: egress pricing is essentially free money for AWS, so they've got lots of room to cut costs there – from what I've heard from people who negotiate real bills with AWS, they're very happy to give you discounts there.
[1]: https://github.com/serverless/examples/tree/master/aws-pytho...
[2]: https://github.com/logandk/serverless-wsgi
[3]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide...
Which means that the REAL question isn't whether they open-source the code (not saying it wouldn't be nice... but it may come with lots of dependencies about their environment that wouldn't be easily replicable elsewhere) but whether their API is open.
And in the case of R2, they mimicked the API for S3. Which is as close to "following a standard" as I think it's possible to get.
This is a really good reason. More competitors is good for me.
That said, I remember when I was rooting for Google against Microsoft and Amazom against Walmart. Before my time people rooted for Microsoft against IBM.
Sometimes we want things to become a little more timeless like Linux or HTML where it is democratized and much freer and slower to chamge.
Cloudflare has to buy, operate, and maintain huge amounts of servers with lots of hard drives, plus all the fiber/copper connecting them across the planet. Linux and HTML are software. They're only "decentralized" in the sense that they don't physically exist anywhere the way that a cloud provider absolutely must.
Another example would be postgres. I can rent postgres, including whatever hardware is used to power it, from AWS, GCP or Azure. Or anybody really, like DigitalOcean or Heroku.
My 'postgres' code will run on every vendors service. The same applies to containers.
That is how I understood the comment 'Linux and HTML', something that is standard and universal, that affords portability and let's vendors compete on quality rather than relying on vendor lockin.
Those were concrete improvements for customers. Better products and pricing and convenience vs. the incumbents.
So if new companies can do the same thing to Google and Amazon, all the better.
But is there some fundamental obstacle that prevents most cloud services to be delivered by commodity RFC-compliant vendors? Or maybe some glue software layer, that, once you purchase a license, can abstract away the actual provider and make it simply a price decision?
I understand the providers will fight tooth and nail against commoditization, but once the initial wave of innovation and savage competition has passed, do they have a fundamental tool to prevent it?
Cloudflare is by no means a small hosting provider. By some accounts, cloudflare is world's leading CDN provider by a long margin, far ahead of AWS in this market, and it currently piles up about half a billion dollars in revenue.
https://blog.intricately.com/2020-state-of-the-cdn-industry-...
What Cloudflare is trying to do is remarkable considering what they are up against.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/aws-earnings-q2-2021.html
I repeat, Cloudflare is already the world's leading CDN provider, ahead of AWS by a long margin. This is not a David vs Golias story. At most it's a CDN Golias vs a all-in Golias.
It's disingenuous to compare Cloudflare and it's CDN offering to AWS at face value based on gross revenue. AWS offers everything from build pipelines to satellite ground stations, and even provides backup services comprised of a big truck with armed guards.
Cloudflare is impressive and very successful, but it's by no means a small upstart, specially when it serves a market where it eclipse all competitors, including AWS.
In any case, it kind of is a David vs. Goliath. Cloudflare currently employs ~1800 people and has revenues of under a billion dollars. They don't qualify as a large enterprise by anyone's definition. They aren't a 2-man shop but they are very much a David in the broader market. Amazon is an absolute monstrosity in comparison.
I think this is generally how things are seen. For example, in the Apple vs Epic lawsuit, the judge said the market was "mobile gaming", and that in that space Apple was not a monopoly.
Amazon total revenue adds up, but in each of the cloud categories they operate in, are they the leader?
Note that cloud flare is not fighting against AWS or Amazon but only against the S3 team inside AWS.
Cloudflare's offering does not compete with Lambda at all. They have completely distinct usecases.
Cloudflare Workers at best compete with Lambda@Edge, which in spite of its name is actually a CloudFront feature.
(Disclosure: I'm the tech lead of Workers.)
Based on what I understand, there are still a few things missing to compete with Lambda's asynchronous use-cases. e.g. Step Functions, 15 min time limits, non-cron events (i.e. events for every CF product), batching events into the same execution, etc. While some of these are technically "not part of Lambda", to compete with Lambda CF needs the ecosystem as well.
Disclosure: 1. I'm an AMZN investor, therefore calling out that the ecosystem is worth keeping in mind. 2. I'm a NET investor, therefore calling out that I'm looking forward to seeing the ecosystem develop :)
Google market cap 1.89T
Microsoft market cap 2.289T
Cloudflare market cap 55.86B
Who do you expect to provide competition to Amazon/Google/Microsoft for egress pricing if not smaller company who is a "leading CDN provider" ?
Your comment seems to be justifying why Cloudflare is ideally suited to provide competition against the big 3 cloud providers with its R2 offering ...
Heck, market caps at this point are almost entirely untethered from reality. {cf. Tesla}
Revenues or profits in the cloud market for each company are mostly a measure of how much they are winning. How much they are spending is a measure of how much they are trying to compete, and the amount they can spend is also dependent on profits in other areas of their respective business.
> Heck, market caps at this point are almost entirely untethered from reality
Most stocks have some basis in reality, and relative value still matters even if you think the whole market is in Lala land. The stocks mentioned are not diamondhand stocks. Variation in valuation is not hitting two orders of magnitude, which is what we have here.
A better measure might be some gross profitability figure for each company that measures how much each company can pump into competing (expenses), but that is hard to calculate, especially for Amazon.
[1] Google Cloud Losses Shrink 59%, Revenue Hits $4.6B https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-cloud-losses...
Edited: added second paragraphs.
Amazon 386B USD
Google 183B USD
Microsoft 143B USD
Cloudflare 431M USD
Similar story ...
Cloud flare is massive in internet impact and is a publicly traded corporation worth billions. There is nothing small here.
> … and you cringe?
Of course, the end game is exactly the same for cloudflare. A proprietary solution that locks you into their platform instead of AWS’s or GCP’s.
Oh how people have forgotten was open source was about in the 90s and 00s.
I thought they were great and had them in front of all my sites.. til I tested the SEO impact and removed it from every single site.
The perf enhancement was minimal at best, the added costs and complexity overhead simply wasn't worth it.
Tried their DNS too, 8.8.8.8 was faster for my network.
Any speculation on what could cause this? Do search engines prefer some IP ranges?
A global DNS resolver may decrease performance, for instance it can give poor results on DNS based load balancers.
Interested to know how you assess SEO impact and your findings.
Anecdotal of course, but the performance boost lead to an easy SEO jump for our sites.
Isn't that a potential massive conflict of interest if Google is reducing the SEO ranking of sites hosted on their competitors' platforms?
If so, yet again, I can't wait for the US DOJ and FTC to just rain hell on these people.
> It would be insane to keep this practice up.
What's the alternative?
Oh yea, did CF ever fix the domain hijacking issue for deleted sites?
I don't see that as an issue right now. They are closed source. But the workers and key/value apis are (so far) either close to native, or very simple in nature. Porting away would be fairly straightforward. It may be a space to watch as more features roll out.
I tend to feel the same as you - preferring portable solutions that I can host anywhere. However, the reality that we're all building CI/CD pipelines as much as we are actual software nowadays, and moving those from one cloud provider to another is no small feat. Even if you're using some infrastructure-as-code tool to manage all of your resources (e.g. terraform), you can't really `SET TARGET=GCP` and re-run the script (so to speak).
I guess the lesson is: spend as much time picking your infrastructure provider as you do your core technical stack. They're not easy to replace! :-)
But, depending on your use case, you could also try to describe your build process is some combination of make files and dockerfiles and then just call that from whatever CI you are using.
Is it still an issue? If yes, any plan to lift this limitation?
Their overhead cost is a concern. As a free service provider to many sites that use them for encryption, they're possibly primarily benefiting (CDN-Wise) from Google's encryption assertions made in Chrome.
A few well-publicized system outages for CloudFlare right now would devastate their entire business model... It's happened.
In order to be independently competitive truly, Cloud Flare would need to probably quickly develop a new mobile phone OS, web browser, and scale their cloud hosting to market prominence very quickly in order to be able to preserve their current market share over the long term, which is a very very steep mountain to climb right now.
It's a very steep mountain to climb, because Google already has the aforementioned things in place, and AWS is firmly embedded with customers that don't want to face huge costs in refactoring apps.
CloudFlare needs to battle Google on many fronts to gain a proper foothold. If I was in leadership, I'd recommend a partnership with a struggling mobile phone company like RIM or Nokia, and possibly with Mozilla on the browser front. Reassuring users about and being committed to upholding personal privacy would be another solid move, and then getting rid of the "utility metered" approach to charging for cloud hosting and introducing simple monthly and annual rates with easier services would likely be ideal moves to ensuring proper growth and market share into the future.
This is the chess game that wins from my perspective... As companies like AWS and Azure develop more and more micro-service and licensing-locked cloud platform apps, it becomes harder and much more costly for those same customers to migrate anywhere else like CloudFlare. This is also why competing with giants is a dangerous game. CloudFlare would need to put a lot on the line to compete.
The smartest hosting customers often stay liquid in terms of which platform they can leverage and migrate to through chess in development, but the process of getting locked into one host platform is now a very real threat. Overall success has always been a chess game to me. Informed and carefully planned strategy, and conservation of resources, always works best.
In the last couple years, CloudFront has gone from not really working to actually working very well. Invalidations are now instant, both from the command line and the CLI. You used to be unable to customize response headers, but now you can do that fairly easily.
Maybe they're not publicly talking about it, but they've actually gone and fixed all the major problems.
Now with Workers, R2, Durable Objects, the server side can move to Cloudflare too. If it makes sense to move servers on the network where the clients are, then this is where they should go.
Or, to draw it further into the scale you mention, a single-party replacement for the internet.
Neither of these things sound like a long-term win.
Short of the new age web3 stuff, though, not sure what else is a suitable alternative. Competitors to Cloudflare aren't as common because of their gigantic moat — imagine building an org that builds out to hundreds of cities around the world and partners with thousands of network companies.
So no. They may have demonstrated business-friendly behaviour. But ethical? No.
You should consider them a hosting company, would you consider a hosting company an ethical company if they hosted nazi forums?
With some strawmanning by this definition sleeping is not neutral as I could fight for a cause, or healthcare is not neutral as you might save a nazi's life.
I'd imagine that Cloudflare's master plan isn't to render Big Cloud obsolete (in a Christiansen/MBA case study sense) . They want to become the edge compute equivalent of Big Cloud (AWS/MSFT/GCP).
They've already invested in the physical prescence to do so (similar to the massive fixed cost that it takes to build hyperscale data centers around the world), in a manner that's most valuable to their customers (low latency compute, storage and egress).
This isn't disruption: it's new market creation. It just won't be obvious that's the case for another 10-15 years...
Always noticeable as Discord will go down.
A comparison of historical downtime amongst DNS and CDN providers shows this to be an illogical consideration.
I’ve been using cloudflare for years at both small and very large scales.
They have had outages yes, but again, relative to the rest of the cloud providers they’re doing just fine.
Are there any tech disruption that will make computing resources affordable for solopreneurs/startups as they once used to be. For the past decade I've seen a very slow gradual decrease in the affordability of cloud computing cost. I trust WASM and WASI will have a huge effect in democratizing the market but I'm not sure yet.
What do you mean by "cloud computing cost"? Digital Ocean will sell you a VPS for $5/month with 1TB bandwidth included. There are tons of hosting providers that offer something similar.
These prices don't seem higher than they were 10 years ago.
What am I missing?
Point being running a couple of servers with a decent ram and a decent amount of storage shouldn’t cost 50$. It should be say, 7$. I know the ask is too much. Just want to see if there’d be any fundamental tech breakthrough to make something like this happen.
Dedicated VM is $30/month for 4GB, but that's the smallest so can't compare there. But that's only a little bit more than the shared vps, so I'd consider it pretty reasonable.
A few years ago I couldn't find a $5/month option. The cheapest Linode was $10/month.
EDIT checked Wayback Machine...10 years ago, a 512MB RAM Linode cost $19.95/month.
Servers are incredibly affordable. AWS isn't because they don't have to be (giving startups $100k credits and coaching them on how to achieve the strongest lock-in works well for them)
s/grains/durable-objects/ etc but hey, it's still all here.
Would love to get a blog post or talk on the journey if you are lurking kenton.
I think the spiritual successor of Sandstorm is Tim Berners-Lee's Solid https://solidproject.org/ that was recently cited in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903601
But, while Sandstorm is all about compartmentalizing access to data in a single server, having the document (grain) as its unit, Solid does this with multiple servers (called pods)
Sandstorm gives the user control over both data and compute -- users install apps on their personal server, like installing apps on their phone. Solid focuses on data, specifying standardized storage interfaces and formats, but still expects compute will take place on machines controlled by the developer.
I think Solid's approach is unrealistic. Developers want to choose their storage formats and technologies. Even developers that fully support users controlling their data are not going to want to bind their hands to standardized formats that don't support the unique features that the developer wants to implement, or standardized database interfaces that don't meet the app's specific usage model.
Also, no developer wants to have to access data across the internet from potentially-unreliable servers on the other side of the world.
So I think realistically the code and data have to stay together; the developer has to be able to specify both the code and the data format.
0: https://github.com/cloudflare/miniflare/blob/master/src/modu...
I feel a little guilty using so many free Cloudflare products, while paying them only a small amount of money for occasional upgrades.
If I were building a serverless based startup, I would seriously consider them over GCP or AWS.
I think most lay people don't know the nuances between chess and go and would presume that chess is the more advanced game based on superficial first impressions. Probably not a good metaphor because I don't know the author's opinion on the games and most people will probably see the title and interpret it in opposite ways. Using "3D chess" instead would have been a more clear metaphor.
A good Go player won't necessarily beat a less good one by a lot, but will consistently take more territory by the end. Or, as one of my Go strategy books put it: think about a kid cutting a brownie in half to share - they want to give themselves a bit more, but if you're too greedy and try to take a large fraction of it, mom won't let you and you'll end up losing out.
I like the idea that in the economy, good ideas and good companies win more often, in that they get the most marketshare, but not necessarily by a lot.
We take a slightly different approach in my house. The person that divides the treat, gets last pick.
It's very effective at getting the closest to equal distribution possible.
The only time it falls apart is when I'm not particularly worried, so I haphazardly break the cookie in half and end up with 1/4 for myself.
Great article, but this guy clearly does not follow competitive chess. The vast majority of games end in a draw.
But, to your point, I'm sure they would if they knew how.
1. Look up what James Hamilton (AWS Distinguished Engineer) has been saying for years about commodity economics disrupting things. It's about the money, stupid.
2. The way AWS has been building out their ecosystem is following a lot of the previous monopolists (Microsoft) playbook. Get other companies to be 'partners' in your ecosystem so they depend on your platform? Check. Training and certification so technologists are tied to your platform? Check, and so on.
3. Amazon and AWS are usually never playing the game people think they are. For example, all the years that people questioned Amazons profits, they were doing their best to hide profits with massive R&D & other investments.
In the case of CloudFlare attacking AWS network/bandwidth pricing, it's worth pointing out that >60% of AWS revenue comes from EC2!!!! S3, and CloudFront is (relatively) small fries.
I've used nextdns.io as a "free & limited" and now paying customer.
Get rid of trackers and ads by dns, I get to give them 20usd/year, so I know that their business model should not be to resell my data. There is an affiliate link to give if you are interested.
iOS app and great UI in the web.
Certainly for certain use cases it could be an alternative. Even as an adjunct to existing S3 use.
However without IAM integration, bucket events, and etc. there is a huge set of use cases where it wouldn't even be a blip on peoples radar.
Chess vs Go? Couldn't AWS just lower their prices for egress with low to medium(medium for AWS) effort? What am I missing here?
AWS having high egress fees is the moat around their business. If AWS respond by lowering egress costs then they are opening the fort.
Google went public @ $20bn and the papers were full of stories about Googlers getting filthy rich. Now bloggers casually comment on scrappy $10bn incumbents and the possibility of integrating a literal currency mint. web 4 is gonna be a bastard.
I wish douglas adams was still around to explain this all to us.
In general, what they do with infra, we do with cryptography & datatypes.
[1] Hyper Hyper Space: https://www.hyperhyperspace.org
[2] HashedObject: https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-core/blob...
I believe some reviewers of his book say that the book is his HBR writings organized into a book. In case you're not aware there is the actual book Clay wrote as well - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
The rest of the article seems reasonable, but IMHO and many other's opinions is that the Intel/Apple/ARM thing is classic disruption from the low end.
No idea if that's accurate or not, though.
And then all clients of Cloudflare that are also AWS clients will switch to AWS for the same service, same cost, but one less headache.
On the other hand, Cloudflare is unable to copy AWS business model.
So, revised title: "AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go on a board and time borrowed from Amazon"
Cloudflare is still in growth mode: They're losing money hand-over-fist. AWS, on the other hand, is a money-printing machine.
Personally, I don't trust Cloudflare until they achieve profitability. They're going to have to raise their rates one day, and alienate the majority of their customers.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/0001...
But isn't it simply that Cloudflare is following the disruptors handbook? And therefore isn't AWS most likely fully aware of what Cloudflare is up to and what the avenues (revenues) for attack are, rather than bumbling around playing the wrong game?
But I've been on calls with agencies. Dept heads, executive yuck-de-yucks. And we've gotten, "Are you using Cloudflare?" We don't, and say so. Resoundingly, we get "GOOD"
We have no clue what the story and history is there. It's bad for sure. And nobody will answer why.
On the commercial end, this makes sense. But damn, egress from the majors suck. But that's roach motel computing...
In general, I could imagine there being pressure on those grounds against using Cloudflare.
As a result they incline toward hosting whoever wants to use them, and moving fast and breaking things. Neither of these align with typical federal govt approach to IT infrastructure, which emphasizes reliability and avoiding known risk.
It’s just a big personality mismatch, and there’s no reason for either to resolve it. Cloudflare doesn’t need the feds, and the feds don’t need Cloudflare, at least not commercially.
Over half of chess games end in a draw, it's the most common outcome!
Cloudflare is not eating anyone. They are just trying to expand their TAM. Cloudflare has always been very good at engineering marketing, and R2 is another masterclass but it will never eat S3
> Cloudflare will be eating everyone. They are trying to expand their TAM, and R2 is a masterclass.
Figured I'd throw another overconfident unsubstantiated claim into the mix. I was even able to use the same exact points to argue the opposite position.
If in 2-3-5 yrs it's proven to be both durable & highly available (I'm looking at your maintenance windows, B2) I don't see a lot of reasons not to move away from S3 as this should be plug & play at this point.
There will be edge cases for highly regulated businesses of course, but for an average startup why not?
It might be interesting for markets where Akamai is not really competing (low budget?). S3 compatible API also is a plus.
I cannot wait until someone finally puts Akamai out of its misery -- they stopped being an innovative company in 2000s.
To win this game, surrounding territory is not enough. You have to go for the king.
happy to take any questions, and yes acknowledged that I dont follow pro chess at all, keeping it in there as a reverse shibboleth and a reminder that i'm just a rando guy on the internet who can be wrong
- I've spent quite some time thinking about how "new clouds" compete with Amazon
- I've seen Netlify argue (with mixed results) that its users should not put Cloudflare in front of Netlify
- I've had casual chats with Rita and James (mentioned in the article) that got me really thinking about what their strategy is. I've had "eating the cloud from outside in" since the start of the year - the Go analogy only came that weekend when I finally sat down to write this thing and R2 was just freshly out.
- I've listened closely to all of Ben Thompson's stuff
I love the custom scrollbar. Works seamlessly, and the chunky look is cool.
I wish Cloudflare all the success, but I don't know if they have a substantive moat here.
Cloudflare is not worried about this, they want that, because it would open market access to a lot of juicy potential clients, who are already cloud ready but AWS locked in.
Plus they have this shot, they try to make this count, to get traction. If AWS moves now it'll be attributed to them. At that point they win by default. (At least that's the theory :))
Even so, dropping egress fees if they see substantial migration could completely change the calculus on the switching costs for users.
But egress fees apply for everything, not just S3.
Currently cross-cloud or multi-cloud orchestration and/or scheduling makes no sense, because egress fees just make it uneconomical (in most cases). The lower the fee gets the better the numbers will look like for mixing and marching services from providers.
We're seeing the cloud grow and naturally evolve into different pieces.
B2 pricing is 0.5 cents/GB/mo, R2 is 1.5 cents/GB/mo.
B2 egress is 1 cents/GB/mo with 1GB/day free, R2 is free.
Cloudflare's CDN can proxy a B2 bucket to get free egress and maybe faster downloads (haven't needed it myself):
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using...
I'm a big fan of B2 because:
- they have low pricing
- they have simple pricing
- they don't use gimmicks: minimum storage time, minimum file size, minimum payment per month, etc.
It is unlikely that this same restriction would apply to R2.
> (eastdakota) That limitation doesn’t apply to the R2 service or Workers generally. We’ll update and clarify our ToS. Thanks for flagging!
They do have C14 Glacier-like object storage for less, but it also has a unique workflow where data is uploaded to a temporary area, archived 7 days later, has a unique archive id that has to be kept and then used to restore archives back into the temporary area.
I tried to signup for Scaleway's free 75GB/mo account just now, to run some performance tests with HashBackup (I'm the author), but they won't allow creating a bucket until credit card details are entered.
By contrast, Backblaze lets you create a new account w/o credit card info, within the free 10GB limit. You only need a credit card to go past 10GB. They have a big button to click to run free proof-of-concept tests that exceed 10GB.
That's why I'm a B2 fan.
The claim is that Amazon competes on a per-service basis, while CloudFlare is competing by flanking with related services.
It doesn't really make sense.