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Blueboat, an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Workers

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Re: Blueboat, an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Workers

#11

Post by ethbr0 »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #10
shoelessone wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same (blue) boat here. To be honest, how Cloudflare Workers work is a bit of a mystery to me as I've only done some very basic prototyping with the service (and not really focusing on the "edge" aspect of them), but it seems like the important "stuff" that makes them what they are is how they are deployed. I am REALLY going to show my ignorance here, but is there some chance that the idea is these "workers" are inten…

Cloudflare workers != js workers. Kinda seems like that's what you are talking about at the end. In my understanding, Cloudflare workers, and "edge" stuff generally, are more like ephemeral server processes that can happen per request, which are backed by some kind of extensive infrastructure that cloudflare, aws, et al can provide. Its not a server, but the promise a server will be there if someone hits that endpoin…

Serverless is compute execution, pure and OS-less.

The genius of Cloudflare Workers is that it couples the one place Cloudflare beats Amazon (their global ubiquity and edge deployment) into a product feature that a customer cares about.

The real genius of AWS at all wasn't "We can sell a thing people will buy" but rather "We can sell excess capacity on a thing we have to have, in order to offer {other, core product}."

And Cloudflare has to have network connectivity and minimal latency.

Re: Blueboat, an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Workers

#12

Post by busymom0 »

As nikivi mentioned, the reason I use CF workers in my project is because of the global distribution of the workers. A user from Europe would have their worker request routed to the closest worker in CF network in Europe instead of a single standalone server on Blueboat which would be in Canada for example.

This renders Blueboat almost the same as having my own server at one location which sort of defeats the purpose imo.

Re: Blueboat, an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Workers

#13

Post by losfair »

Hello HN! Author of Blueboat here.

Blueboat was originally named rusty-workers and used the Isolate model for workload isolation, similar to Cloudflare Workers. Later I changed to use process-based isolation because it seems that a shared-process multi-tenant system is overly complex for self-hosting users like myself to operate (automatically applying security patches within hours, sophisticated scheduling strategy to prevent ill-behaving applications from crashing the process, auditing each dependency for memory safety issues, etc.).

Blueboat is not yet optimized for global-scale operation but it is definitely the goal. Things not implemented include: custom TLS termination (which enables 0ms cold start), HTTP routing, and a single dashboard to operate the entire system.

Currently, the user needs to set up their own infrastructure for deploying Blueboat globally:

- Cross-region replicated S3-compatible storage for distributing code and config.

- Kafka instance at each region for log collection and task scheduling.

- A way to route traffic to a nearby location (usually DNS / Anycast).

- Log aggregator (I use ClickHouse for this).

Re: Blueboat, an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Workers

#15

Post by bigiain »

busymom0 wrote: post #12

As nikivi mentioned, the reason I use CF workers in my project is because of the global distribution of the workers. A user from Europe would have their worker request routed to the closest worker in CF network in Europe instead of a single standalone server on Blueboat which would be in Canada for example. This renders Blueboat almost the same as having my own server at one location which sort of defeats the purpose…

I wonder if there's a use case for "distributed but not to the global internet as a whole"?

Maybe you could have a Blueboat Docker container running in each office for local office/intranet users? Or one in each of the datacenters your users VPN into? Some simple-ish dns based geographical or subnet routing for a handful of Blueboat instances in your various on-prem or local cloud zones should be manageable enough without need ing too much magic.

Not sure how to sensibly sync them all or centralise databases/storage for them though.

Re: Blueboat, an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Workers

#18

Post by mathiasrw »

losfair wrote: post #13

Hello HN! Author of Blueboat here. Blueboat was originally named rusty-workers and used the Isolate model for workload isolation, similar to Cloudflare Workers. Later I changed to use process-based isolation because it seems that a shared-process multi-tenant system is overly complex for self-hosting users like myself to operate (automatically applying security patches within hours, sophisticated scheduling strategy…

This this is awesome. Thank you for creating Blueboat.

Have you had any thoughts about how much rebuild it would take to support Deno javascript?

Re: Blueboat, an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Workers

#19

Post by technobabbler »

Doesn't this sort of... miss the entire point of serverless? It's an API framework, with syntax like serverless, but without the whole advantage of serverless: not having to manage individual servers, CDNs, networking, mirroring, etc.

So you end up with something like Flight PHP or Next.js's API routes, but still needs to be deployed and then manually managed and scaled.

Cloudflare Workers is innovative not because it's isolated or follows a particular syntax, but because they allow very fast and cheap functions to be run, globally, with zero maintenance on the customers' parts. Just write code and click save and it's available at data centers all around the world, instantly, for not even pennies.

Blueboat would be incredibly difficult to scale up and maintain across clusters. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no way to deploy this at a cost even remotely similar to what Cloudflare offers, since individual customers don't have their economies of scale (and peering agreements).

Re: Blueboat, an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Workers

#20

Post by lf-non »

technobabbler wrote: post #19

Doesn't this sort of... miss the entire point of serverless? It's an API framework, with syntax like serverless, but without the whole advantage of serverless: not having to manage individual servers, CDNs, networking, mirroring, etc. So you end up with something like Flight PHP or Next.js's API routes, but still needs to be deployed and then manually managed and scaled. Cloudflare Workers is innovative not because i…

Not necessarily - I think the target audience is different.

If you are administering an internal datacenter in a company, then you can utilize this to offer a serverless env. to application developers in your company, and then those developers would benefits similar to that of AWS lambda/CF workers etc.

Someone will obviously have to manage servers, but in addition to it, it is also quite a bit of work to support orchestration of ephemeral functions, and a nice open source framework is definitely a huge help there.

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