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Comment by WORMS_EAT_WORMS | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare will regret not having a developer go-to framework for their advanced Worker stuff one day.

I think they are waiting for someone else to build for it which is IMO the completely wrong approach for the dream of the serverless app. You got to own the full stack including software.

I can easily see Vercel becoming the pretty much only go-to in this space just from the developer trust they have created with Next (and now Svelte). The general getting started experience between the two serverless providers is night and day.

One is where do I begin / how should I do this (cloudflare).

The other is simply code... and... go! (vercel)

I'll be all in on whatever Rich makes there. Been waiting for a solid Cloudflare Worker framework for literally years bridging front-end and back-end. Instead, we got Pages (which is cool, just boring for the fun stuff).

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Cloudflare currently markets successfully to a very different calibre of engineer. Meanwhile, Vercel don't even support 2FA login yet, and publish mandatory cache-busting query string parameters to the public Internet. Their "CDN" is a BYOIP range running on AWS Global Accelerator

Hey! Guillermo, CEO of Vercel here. Security is the absolute top priority at Vercel, and you should be seeing continued progress in that area in the coming weeks and months.

We're heavily investing in security all the way from the SDK and its supply chain[1] to platform, product and cloud.

We proudly use the best infrastructure and products available to help our customers scale without stress. AGA is quite incredible[2] and so is Cloudflare[3] and we are honored to be able to work closely with the purveyors of the finest infrastructure on the Internet!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003089

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29158742

[3] https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1456665048949018626

Hey Guillermo,

Thanks for chiming in here. Unrelated, I saw that Vercel is ramping up hiring for designers. I’ve always worked in consumer-facing design spaces (banking, travel, etc.) and want to make a change toward something more dev-oriented like Vercel, but I worry being told that “I don’t have the right experience”. Does Vercel hire folks looking to change the industry they design for? I’m a senior IC in design systems, so the extent of what I design for devs is mainly documentation sites.

Absolutely. A core goal for us is to Lower the Barrier of Entry[1] to building for the Web.

Building a beautiful and fast Web experience needs to feel myspace-code-easy (or as Rich Harris puts it: it has to be fun!). I think ultimately that's what makes the Web win long term. It's open and accessible.

The best way to contribute to this mission is to come in with a fresh mindset, passion and big ambitions. Please reach out: https://vercel.com/careers

[1] https://rauchg.com/2021/making-the-web-faster#realtime

SvelteKit has an out-of-the-box adapter for Cloudflare workers: https://github.com/sveltejs/kit/tree/master/packages/adapter...

I hope that Rich joining Vercel doesn't end up compromising SvelteKit's current neutrality when it comes to deployment targets.

As a heavy contributor to SvelteKit, I can't see a loss in neutrality happening. I personally use other hosting platforms frequently with SvelteKit, both Rich and Vercel have expressed they want to avoid this outcome, and other SvelteKit maintainers work full-time at Vercel competitors and also wouldn't let that happen ;-)

This is kind of exactly my point in not owning the full stack with Serverless.

I'd be a bit nervous right now if I built my business / app on that.

They do have https://flareact.com/ and although it is still early, it is very promising. They have used patterns from Next.js so it is easy for developers to migrate.

This is not Cloudflare:

> Flareact is an experiment created by Josh Larson in August 2020.

You are right. Sounds like they need to sponsor him!

Yes! To compete, cloudflare really needs a nicer "full-stack" experience where you have one repo, one config file, one CLI and one codebase that is shipped automatically into pages and however many workers, dns rules, kv stores, durable objects, Images and Stream deployments etc. They have Wrangler but it doesn‘t really feel "complete". At least they should rename it to cloudflare-cli and cloudflare.toml.

I predict that Cloudflare will acquire Vercel one day.

I do think it's interesting how they've positioned Cloudflare Pages. Kind of an "Amazon" move. Unlimited bandwidth and seats. Will be interesting to see though if it works for Cloudflare, they still don't even have Gitlab integration.

The 25mb limit in folder size isn't enough for mid-sized blog though, even if you host the images somewhere else.

I think an executive has commented before that is not going to happen. Things can change though.

If I were Vercel, absolutely would not sell either. They aren't like "Netlify" and positioned to be truly the goat of serverless.

> They aren't like "Netlify"

What do you mean by this?

Vercel is built on cloudflare workers meaning vercel winning means cloudflare wins. Also I think building out the datacenters across the globe is a much harder problem than building out a framework.

Vercel's infrastructure is multi-cloud, primarily using AWS. We're currently using Workers specifically for Edge Functions (https://vercel.com/edge).

That animation in the background could use a little optimization. It's redrawing nonstop for no reason. Left the site open for a few mins and it got my humble Thinkpad's fans going hard (Vivaldi).

Thanks for the feedback, we'll improve this!

Do you have a reference for this? Curious to learn more. I thought Vercel was built on AWS.

making a framework popular is harder than making data center stuff; people successfully rack boxes and crank rust/go/js/.. every day, but most js frameworks fail

Denoflare (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29142772) is compelling.

Do you have experience with denoflare? I really would like to try it, but I can't even get the basic `hello-worker` sample working, see https://github.com/skymethod/denoflare/issues/2

Hi there, denoflare is still in early development, thanks for trying it out - that issue you found should be fixed in the latest release 0.3.1

Also not Cloudflare (to my knowledge)

Correct - no affiliation, just a happy customer.

Cloudflare seems to be disciplined about releasing solid lower-level platform building blocks first (e.g. durable objects), and leaving the "developer go-to framework for their advanced Worker stuff" to be built on top later.

Seems like a smart approach to me, but I agree the space is moving fast and even though they release stuff at a pretty rapid pace, it never seems fast enough for early adopters

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