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I'm Joining CloudFlare

words.steveklabnik.com

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Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#91

Post by steveklabnik »

tptacek wrote: post #90
steveklabnik wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So this seems like pretty legitimate grist for discussion. Are you comfortable with your advocacy here, or having second thoughts about it? My job isn't to be a PR person for everything Cloudflare does. Cloudflare has and does things I disagree with. It's a company with a lot of people working there, after all :) All of this stuff is completely outside of what is going to be my job. And a job I haven't even started…

... right! I agree! So, again: why were you volunteering opinions about the norms-compliance of this Cloud Flare project on Reddit, rather than just saying, "huh, no idea, wasn't involved"?

Because, while it's a personal thing I am working on, I haven't yet totally learned to not write paragraphs of text when someone asks me a question. I'll get there :) I'll save this thread as a reminder for next time I'm tempted ;)

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#92

Post by drwl »

mindcrime wrote: post #87
tptacek wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As to why I'm commenting on it: because it was submitted for our comment, and this is my comment. Was it? Is there any particular expectation that HN users must comment on stories, as opposed to simply reading them and gaining whatever value they gain from that exercise? I don't know about you, but I certainly don't feel compelled to comment on every HN post. And judging by how many posts hit the /newest page and dis…

This is on the top/front page though

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#93

Post by tptacek »

steveklabnik wrote: post #91
tptacek wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... right! I agree! So, again: why were you volunteering opinions about the norms-compliance of this Cloud Flare project on Reddit, rather than just saying, "huh, no idea, wasn't involved"?

Because, while it's a personal thing I am working on, I haven't yet totally learned to not write paragraphs of text when someone asks me a question. I'll get there :) I'll save this thread as a reminder for next time I'm tempted ;)

Totally legit response. Thanks!

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#94

Post by jwr »

CloudFlare Workers look like a really interesting target for ClojureScript applications. I'm not sure if that's doable for now within their limitations, but would enable a whole new way of writing web apps.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#95

Post by yashap »

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…

FWIW, I think “edge compute but centralized db” is often not just “not gaining the full benefit of edge compute”, it’s actually “way slower than everything centralized.” I’ve worked on plenty of systems where a single web facing endpoint results in 10+ db queries. With “everything centralized”, this means 1 big round trip to the data centre, then lots of tiny/fast within-datacentre round trips. But move compute away from the db, and suddenly you’re triggering tonnes of really slow db calls on every client request, and the whole system slows down tremendously.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#96

Post by [deleted] »

mindcrime wrote: post #87
tptacek wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As to why I'm commenting on it: because it was submitted for our comment, and this is my comment. Was it? Is there any particular expectation that HN users must comment on stories, as opposed to simply reading them and gaining whatever value they gain from that exercise? I don't know about you, but I certainly don't feel compelled to comment on every HN post. And judging by how many posts hit the /newest page and dis…

[deleted]

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#97

Post by steveklabnik »

yashap wrote: post #95
steveklabnik wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW, I think “edge compute but centralized db” is often not just “not gaining the full benefit of edge compute”, it’s actually “way slower than everything centralized.” I’ve worked on plenty of systems where a single web facing endpoint results in 10+ db queries. With “everything centralized”, this means 1 big round trip to the data centre, then lots of tiny/fast within-datacentre round trips. But move compute away…

Yep, this sounds fair! For smaller things that aren't 10+ queries, I can imagine it not being that bad, but for that, yeah, that sounds much slower.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#99

Post by zzzcpan »

yashap wrote: post #95
steveklabnik wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW, I think “edge compute but centralized db” is often not just “not gaining the full benefit of edge compute”, it’s actually “way slower than everything centralized.” I’ve worked on plenty of systems where a single web facing endpoint results in 10+ db queries. With “everything centralized”, this means 1 big round trip to the data centre, then lots of tiny/fast within-datacentre round trips. But move compute away…

This is why edge computing is going to be different. You have to be able to fetch and rely on data from the closest nodes, prefetch all the likely queries all at once, merge updates locally to keep relying on them while resyncing in background, etc. All while also not having data loss or weird hard to reason about inconsistencies. Basically all the reasons CRDTs were invented.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#100

Post by alexmingoia »

kwindla wrote: post #49

This wasm-at-the-edge stuff is so exciting! It's always dangerous to predict the future, but one possible future for the web feels like it's starting to come into focus: javascript as the default language everywhere (frontend, backend, edge), plus the ability to compile lots and lots of other languages to WebAssembly. A runtime that works everywhere (or, more accurately, a handful of partially compatible runtimes) wi…

You don't need WASM to deploy compiled binaries to a web server, so I don't understand the excitement. It may be convenient for the provider (CloudFlare), but not necessarily for the customer. Performance will be better without WASM and it's an additional step in the build pipeline, compared with CloudFlare supporting any x86 binary.

WASM's purpose is to compile languages to run in a web browser. A CloudFlare "worker" is a web server that runs at a data center close to the user.

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