I'm Joining CloudFlare • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#71

Post by foobarbazetc » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:49 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #51

tptacek wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah just to be clear, you're simply at the leading edge of a phenomenon that's been puzzling me for awhile, probably starting with that Yegge/Grab piece (after which, from what I can tell, he was never heard from again). Don't fade away!

:) Oh, one last bit I missed: > Like: did you want to write this, or did Cloud Flare reallllllly want you to write this? I brought up to them that I wanted to write a post about joining, and asked if they wanted marketing to look it over or something. They said "no need, we'll be happy with whatever you write." I see it as a mutually beneficial thing, and always have, everywhere I've worked.

Are you concerned at all how the Wireguard thing is playing out vs your desire to see this stuff open sourced?

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#72

Post by felipeccastro » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #59

felipeccastro wrote: post #53

This is the second post I see about this edge functions, and while I appreciate the advantages (decreasing network latency should definitely have an impact), will this matter much if the database is still centralized? If most edge functions still need to talk to a centralized database, won’t that be essentially the same, performance wise?

You are 100% right. I said this in the post: > My role as part of Storage will be to consider “what does data access and storage look like in this world?” If your code is moved to the edge, but your data is still in a central server, you don’t gain the full benefit of having the code close to the client. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this space! Fixing this problem, or at least coming up with the plan to fix…

Oh, I must have skipped that part... nice! Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to see where that goes. Having reliable, easy distributed data storage + edge functions would certainly be a game changer.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#73

Post by tptacek » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

libria wrote: post #64

tptacek wrote: post #33

This is a genre of post that I've never really understood. Klabnik is great and all, but, ok? Sure? Were people really record-scratching over his totally reasonable decision to take a good-paying job at a big company? It's obviously not just Klabnik. In fact, when we did Starfighter a few years back, I think Patrick did one of these posts as well. But: like every other post about Starfighter on HN while we were worki…

What exactly is the confusion here? That people share things on their own blog? Or that people vote it up on HN? If the former, people share all sorts of oddities in their own personal space especially life-changing events of which career moves is one. If the latter, a lot of people follow "developer influencers" to keep up on the cutting edge trends. I'm personally keeping an eye on the Rust Book and hoping it maint…

It is probably way more the latter concern (the voting) than the former (the writing), but note upthread that Klabnik was aware this was going to happen when he wrote it, which is why he asked Cloud Flare marketing about it first.

As to why I'm commenting on it: because it was submitted for our comment, and this is my comment.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#74

Post by rpdillon » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #37

tptacek wrote: post #33

This is a genre of post that I've never really understood. Klabnik is great and all, but, ok? Sure? Were people really record-scratching over his totally reasonable decision to take a good-paying job at a big company? It's obviously not just Klabnik. In fact, when we did Starfighter a few years back, I think Patrick did one of these posts as well. But: like every other post about Starfighter on HN while we were worki…

It's cool man, not everything is for everyone. > Were people really record-scratching over his totally reasonable decision to take a good-paying job at a big company? I actually anticipated a few people being confused because of a few reasons. It seems like, so far at least, nobody has actually been confused. It happens. But I've experienced a lot of that previously; so like, moving from "writing documentation" to "p…

FWIW, I love posts like this. They combine tech, a dash of prognostication, an overview about career trajectory and how you think about it, and a bit about the space you're entering and how you see the competition. It's a fun read, and I appreciate you taking the time to pen it!

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#75

Post by cbhl » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:53 PM UTC

Reading this piece, it feels like the logical next leap is for someone to come up with "Personal Lambdas", where the lambda is able to run offline, with even lower latency than the edge.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#76

Post by zackbloom » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

foobarbazetc wrote: post #71

steveklabnik wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) Oh, one last bit I missed: > Like: did you want to write this, or did Cloud Flare reallllllly want you to write this? I brought up to them that I wanted to write a post about joining, and asked if they wanted marketing to look it over or something. They said "no need, we'll be happy with whatever you write." I see it as a mutually beneficial thing, and always have, everywhere I've worked.

Are you concerned at all how the Wireguard thing is playing out vs your desire to see this stuff open sourced?

The Cloudflare Wireguard implementation is open-sourced and BSD licensed, what would be the concern? https://github.com/cloudflare/boringtun

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#77

Post by foobarbazetc » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #68

ilovecaching wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- AWS has an edge network. Microsoft and Google have huge edge networks, with PoPs all over the place. Akamai also has a huge edge network. You also have to guess at the size of each PoP, which is just as important as having a PoP in a location. - CF still has a less sophisticated targeting system than these larger companies that have been doing this for a long time. Targeting is everything when it comes to CDNs. - S…

> CF still has a less sophisticated targeting system than these larger companies that have been doing this for a long time. Targeting is everything when it comes to CDNs. Do you have pointers to public data comparing services?

Just look up Maglev from Google. I mean, that stuff is years ahead of CF (don’t get me wrong, CF is fine).

Argo from CF is a year or so old and that sort of stuff was done like 10+ years ago at Akamai. Cotendo had a great system that was more impressive 5+ years ago.

Stackpath don’t have the sort of resources that CF has but have been doing edge compute for a while now (though not WASM).

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#78

Post by steveklabnik » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

foobarbazetc wrote: post #71

steveklabnik wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) Oh, one last bit I missed: > Like: did you want to write this, or did Cloud Flare reallllllly want you to write this? I brought up to them that I wanted to write a post about joining, and asked if they wanted marketing to look it over or something. They said "no need, we'll be happy with whatever you write." I see it as a mutually beneficial thing, and always have, everywhere I've worked.

Are you concerned at all how the Wireguard thing is playing out vs your desire to see this stuff open sourced?

I think it depends on which "Wireguard thing" you're talking about, there were several semi-controversies.

If you mean "Warp doesn't support generic clients", I commented about that over on the Reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b9sznr/im_join...

If you mean "CloudFlare pursued BoringTon outside of the general WireGuard project", well, I don't have any real insight into the specifics of why that was chosen, but it seems extremely open source to me. As far as I know, BoringTon is just an implementation of a protocol. There's a ton of reasons to want to do things on your own rather than work on upstream. And if anything, for protocols, independent implementations can be a good thing, more than a bad thing.

If you mean something else, well, I'm not sure, those are the only ones I can remember :p

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#79

Post by tptacek » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:58 PM UTC

zackbloom wrote: post #76

foobarbazetc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you concerned at all how the Wireguard thing is playing out vs your desire to see this stuff open sourced?

The Cloudflare Wireguard implementation is open-sourced and BSD licensed, what would be the concern? https://github.com/cloudflare/boringtun

That Jason asked Cloud Flare to contribute to an actual sanctioned Rust port of WireGuard --- important to Jason because the current userland implementation is Go, and thus not as fast as it could possibly be, which is a priority for Jason --- and they refused and built their own instead. Also, WireGuard-the-protocol is not a collaborative effort, and so Jason's presumably a bit concerned about a divergent fork this early in the process of getting WireGuard fielded. Particularly because Jason is just one dude working on this with a couple volunteers, and Cloud Flare is, well, yeah.

It was a pretty weird move on Cloud Flare's part. I'm not saying it was "bad", just, weird.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#80

Post by steveklabnik » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

cbhl wrote: post #75

Reading this piece, it feels like the logical next leap is for someone to come up with "Personal Lambdas", where the lambda is able to run offline, with even lower latency than the edge.

So, fun fact: Workers is based off of the Web Worker standard https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers...

As part of this, you have Service Workers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...

> They are intended, among other things, to enable the creation of effective offline experiences, intercept network requests and take appropriate action based on whether the network is available, and update assets residing on the server.

So yeah, you can already do something like this today!