Blueboat, an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Workers • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by technobabbler » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 8:51 AM UTC

lf-non wrote: post #20

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 orc…

That's a good point... you mean like enterprises with big IT teams who want to in-house Cloudflare Workers and run it on their own infrastructure?

That makes sense if they already have the network but not necessarily the easy to use APIs for serverless. Kinda a way to overlay new dev modalities onto old infrastructure, I suppose.

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

#22

Post by philholden » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 9:40 AM UTC

I would be very interested if there was a decentralized version of Cloudflare Workers. Doing for compute what IPFS does for files with CF workers web like API (KV Store and Durable Objects).

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

#23

Post by dare_falcon » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 10:57 AM UTC

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…

There are a metric tonne of use cases for enterprises to deploy their own serverless environments under their own control vs a cloud provider, for the very reason that only a fraction of compute is being processed at the edge vs VPC.

Congrats on your milestone.

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

#24

Post by wongarsu » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 11:07 AM UTC

technobabbler wrote: post #21

lf-non wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 orc…

That's a good point... you mean like enterprises with big IT teams who want to in-house Cloudflare Workers and run it on their own infrastructure? That makes sense if they already have the network but not necessarily the easy to use APIs for serverless. Kinda a way to overlay new dev modalities onto old infrastructure, I suppose.

Not just old infrastructure, there are plenty of good reasons to run your own infrastructure beyond "that's what we've always done".

Edit: Good reasons not in the sense of "everyone should do it" but in the sense of "for some situations it's the right choice"

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

#25

Post by tentacleuno » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 11:09 AM UTC

zild3d wrote: post #3

nikivi wrote: post #2

I thought the reason why Cloudflare Workers were great is that they utilize the many CDN points that Cloudflare owns. Or you can use Blueboat with say Fastly and achieve nearly the same thing?

Same, the cloudflare workers tagline is "Deploy serverless code instantly across the globe to give it exceptional performance, reliability, and scale." Maybe I missed something in the blueboat readme, but don't see how this deploys across the globe and scales automatically How about 0ms cold starts? Is this actually open source cloudflare workers or just open source serverless functions? https://workers.cloudflare.co…

See OP's top comment[0], specifically this part:

> 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)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29325570

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

#26

Post by mnutt » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 8:03 PM UTC

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…

First off, this is really cool. I have been hoping for something like this for a while.

Given that the Isolate model has already been developed, have you considered a hybrid isolate/process model, where workers created by a single user could be packed into a process via Isolates, but the process boundary protected different users from each other?