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Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here's an early look

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here's an early look

#31

Post by jgrahamc »

srockets wrote: post #29
tomrod wrote: post #8

This seems like a pretty big deal. I want to like CloudFlare over DO/AWS. I like their DevX focus too -- I could see issues if devs can't get into the abstractions though. Any red flags folks would stake regarding CF? I know they are widely used but not sure where the gotchas are.

Won't apply to everyone (most?), but some compliance assurances your customers may require can't be fulfilled by Cloudflare. And personally, I would hope their laissez faire attitude towards protecting hate speech should damage their business, but I suspect most people not targeted by such just don't give a damn.

but some compliance assurances your customers may require can't be fulfilled by Cloudflare.

Such as? See: https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/compliance-resources/

Re: Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here's an early look

#32

Post by remram »

pjmlp wrote: post #2

So I just discovered that Cloudfare now owns the trademark for Sun's "The Network is the Computer". "Cloudflare serves the entire world — region: earth. Rather than asking developers to provision resources in specific regions, data centers and availability zones, we think “The Network is the Computer”. " https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-network-is-the-computer/

> The global scheduler is built on Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, and KV, and decides which Cloudflare location to schedule the container to run in. Each location then runs its own scheduler, which decides which metals within that location to schedule the container to run on.

So they just use the term "location" instead of "region".

Re: Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here's an early look

#33

Post by DonHopkins »

pjmlp wrote: post #2

So I just discovered that Cloudfare now owns the trademark for Sun's "The Network is the Computer". "Cloudflare serves the entire world — region: earth. Rather than asking developers to provision resources in specific regions, data centers and availability zones, we think “The Network is the Computer”. " https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-network-is-the-computer/

Did they also get the old DEC t-shirt trademark: "The Network Is The Network and The Computer Is The Computer. We regret the confusion."

IBM mocked Sun with: "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!

https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computin...

Re: Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here's an early look

#34

Post by DonHopkins »

surfingdino wrote: post #28

Looks like CloudFlare will soon be using "All other clouds are behind ours." slogan.

"We're the silver lining."

"We'll keep you on the edge of your seat."

"Nice parade you got there. It sure would be a shame if somebody were to rain on it."

Re: Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here's an early look

#35

Post by lysace »

Lots of cool stuff in this blog post. Impressive work on many fronts!

If I understand correctly, you will be running actual third party compute workloads/containers in hundreds of network interexchange locations.

Is that in line with what the people running these locations have in mind? Can you scale this? Aren't these locations often very power/cooling-constrained?

Re: Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here's an early look

#37

Post by dopylitty »

I like the dig at "first generation" clouds.

There really is a wide gulf between the services provided by the older cloud providers (AWS, Azure) and the newer ones (fly.io, CloudFlare etc).

AWS/Azure provide very leaky abstractions (VMs, VPCs) on top of very old and badly designed protocols/systems (IP, Windows, Linux) . That's fine for people who want to spend all their time janitoring VMs, operating systems, and networks but for developers who just want to write code that provides a service it's much better to be able to say to the cloud provider "Here's my code, you make sure it's running somewhere" and let the cloud provider deal with the headaches. Even the older providers' PaaS services have too many knobs to deal with (I don't want to think about putting a load balancer in front of ECS or whatever)

Re: Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here's an early look

#38

Post by ignoramous »

wmf wrote: post #19
tomrod wrote: post #8

This seems like a pretty big deal. I want to like CloudFlare over DO/AWS. I like their DevX focus too -- I could see issues if devs can't get into the abstractions though. Any red flags folks would stake regarding CF? I know they are widely used but not sure where the gotchas are.

Is Cloudflare the one that goes from free to "call for pricing" ($100K+) at the drop of a hat?

One data point but, one among our toy services has been pushing 30TB/mo to 60TB/mo for over a year now, and we haven't got the call: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39521228

Re: Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here's an early look

#40

Post by abadpoli »

dopylitty wrote: post #37

I like the dig at "first generation" clouds. There really is a wide gulf between the services provided by the older cloud providers (AWS, Azure) and the newer ones (fly.io, CloudFlare etc). AWS/Azure provide very leaky abstractions (VMs, VPCs) on top of very old and badly designed protocols/systems (IP, Windows, Linux) . That's fine for people who want to spend all their time janitoring VMs, operating systems, and ne…

This undersells the fact that there’s a lot more to infrastructure management than “janitoring”. You and many others may want to just say “here’s my code, ship it”, but there’s also a massive market of people that _need_ the customization and deep control over things like load balancers, because they’re pumping petabytes of data through it and using a cloud-managed LB is leaving money and performance on the table. Or there are companies that _need_ the strong isolation between regions for legal and security reasons, even if it comes with added complexity.

A lot of developers get frustrated at AWS or Azure because they want to deploy their hobby app on it and realize it’s too difficult dealing with stuff like IAM - it’s like trying to dig a small hole in your garden and someone suggests you go buy a Caterpillar Excavator, when all you needed was a hand trowel. The reason this persists is because AWS doesn’t target the hobby developer - it targets the massive enterprise that does need the customization and power it provides, despite the complexity. There are, thankfully, other companies that have come in to serve up cloud hand trowels.

There is no “one size fits all” cloud. There probably never will be. They’re all going to coexist for the foreseeable future.

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