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Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

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Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#31

Post by sarreph »

I have to say: Yes, there is a lot of velocity from Cloudflare pushing out AI-adjacent features as of late.

But also: What they've doing with Workers et al. has made them a platform for fully-fledged apps and deployments. I personally love the ecosystem and use it for all of my projects now. It's like the perfect blend of ease-of-use and DX of Heroku, and breadth of services of AWS / GCP. Well, maybe not quite AWS or GCP, but that's kind of the point -- they've created an opinionated system of "objects" that are all highly extensible to the point where in my opinion you can pretty much deploy anything you want on it.

It took me a bit of time to learn the "Cloudflare way" of doing things, but once I started making on it I saw just how flexible (and low cost!) everything is.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#32

Post by daishi55 »

gegtik wrote: post #22
daishi55 wrote: post #9

I don’t understand the impulse to whine and complain about the aesthetics of a big company. > a little more cringey and clique Why on earth do I care if someone thinks Cloudflare is cringe? What is interesting about that? They are following the market like everyone else. > Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great…They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and…

i read the article as caring about the values, principles, and goals of the human beings driving it. if you are looking exclusively at compiled bits and bytes and/or quarterly statements then I agree, human/societal judgment seems irrelevant.

What values and principles are supposed to be preventing cloudflare, the internet and technology company, from exploring hot new internet markets and technologies?

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#33

Post by aleda145 »

Hard disagree. Sure their docs are bad, and it's sometimes buggy. But to me cloudflare is actually innovating and trying to offer "new" infrastructure. Durable objects and workers are super cool. R2 has free egress, isn't it insane that they could pull that off?

If what you want is a VM to run postgres then there are other offerings that would be much better.

Not saying they aren't evil though, they probably are, but the infra stuff is cool.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#34

Post by themgt »

I view a lot of this as downstream from sort of the IaaS version of the "DRM problem" in cryptography.

In the DRM problem you want to sell someone a Blu-Ray with a movie they can play, but also not allow them to copy the movie. So they get the data but can't have the data.

In the IaaS problem you want to sell someone a piece of server(s) in a datacenter they can play with, but also not allow them to just directly use the hardware (because then they could have open standards and portability). So the product teams are required to work backwards from the necessity of wrapping compute in a thing you can sell as a product.

This also explains nonsense like "durable objects", which may have some purpose but become the weekly podcast fad after getting hyped by cloud providers trying to find new ways to sell compute without selling compute.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#35

Post by daishi55 »

ajkjk wrote: post #26
daishi55 wrote: post #9

I don’t understand the impulse to whine and complain about the aesthetics of a big company. > a little more cringey and clique Why on earth do I care if someone thinks Cloudflare is cringe? What is interesting about that? They are following the market like everyone else. > Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great…They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and…

Because it affects people personally? They are using the stuff that's being neglected, and they could be using the stuff that is being half-assed if it's better. And I don't believe it has to do with the market. I've worked at a company that was run by pms doing stupid shit. It was dressed up as what the business needed, but it was sheer incompetence. Better people in exactly the same situation would have produced be…

Not directing this at you personally. But I've heard a lot of mediocre engineers whine and complain about PMs, MBAs, C-suite, etc. The best engineers I don't hear complaining much at all. Just a thought.

And sorry but I don't agree that launching AI products in 2026 is not related to the market. I think that's the whole basis for the decision.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#36

Post by minraws »

orf wrote: post #3

> First of all tons of more outages than ever, remember that React useEffect fkup [0]? Complete insane that this would happen at an infra company that runs a third or so of the web. Bugs happen all the time. They roughly increase with scale, not decrease. There’s an argument to be made about better testing, but this specific bug seems like a perfect one to slip through: multiple services, hard to spot at code review,…

Bugs happen all the time yes, outages don't.

If outages are increasing with scale you get 1 or maybe 2 free passes.

After that you either have in-ept Engineering or just in-ept leadership.

I used to be all in on CF a while ago, now I am moving off them almost entirely.

Same issue with GitHub, I can understand if you can't build for the scale when you couldn't predict it but if after over 12-18 months things don't seem to be improving what are you even doing?

I honestly think all of these companies are deluded if they think people will stick around with all these weekly outage events.

I have a homelab server I have had 2 outages in 1 year because my shitty ISP went down. Still at 99.9% uptime, I have done nothing special. I now have backup internet as well.

Is it big? Nope but it doesn't need to be cf scale.

And scale is the reason to use these services why would I use cloudflare if a homelab would have been enough?

If they aren't designing and scaling their systems to handle this scale they might as well close shop, someone else might do it better.

As a infra/dev person who does his own thing on the side, I might be the most impacted by these outages, so I might be coming off as harsh. But they cost me both time/money and headache in extra development work.

Imagine prod deploys are down for 2 days why? Because GitHub actions keep failing...

Oh serving new OTA updates broke? Why? dig into the code.. go oncall with users instead of doing work, realize it's a CF outage and the writes failed. (Feel the tears streaming down your face).

If I have to waste dev time, with AI and me together we could self host it with higher reliability with significantly cheaper costs at this point even at fairly decent scale.

I think any infra company that has more than 1 outage a year is already not worth investing in.

But more than 3 and you might be better off self hosting, even in this ram apocalypse.

If all people in SF are this unserious about reliability (which hasn't been my experience but HN seems especially open to break the prod if you have to)

Then well software companies really do deserve to be replaced by AI.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#37

Post by nzeid »

This is definitely as opinionated as an opinion piece can go. Worth mentioning I don't use CF anywhere or care about it... but my employer does.

I can really only remember one catastrophic outage. It involved some part of CF that had no redundancy, and the incident was followed by a pretty whiny blog about a data center.

That's pretty much it. There were other minor outages but I'm not aware that it affected business.

Despite the disclaimer I think the author should explain precisely how "AI product mindset" or whatever is actually translating to bad outcomes.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#38

Post by NicoJuicy »

For an article that claims to know Cloudflare, I don't think he does.

Cloudflare build from the bottom up. First the SDN ( Software Defined Network), then the products on top. The first one was logical: CDN + DDOS.

All the rest continued to build on top of the SDN - Workers, D1, ... But once they have the full stack ( which happened arround D1), it was time to let others build on top of Cloudflare.

That's the current stage ( Cloud 2.0), that was always the goal. It's even in their ticker ( NET ).

In practise, AI could be a godsend. A total new foundation for software where the Cloudflare stack is a perfect product fit( disposable compute, where others will protect their compute with long running compute contracts). I can't blame them to try to seize the opportunity.

Tbh. I feels like the author hasn't actually adjusted to how Cloudflare is building it's cloud ( eg. how powerfull Durable Objects is).

PS. A big outage is a long time ago... ( we use them, I remember the issues those days and the post mortem, a lot became more stable as far as I noticed).

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#39

Post by bulder »

reisse wrote: post #11

> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better There wasn't. Cloudflare is a cancer grown too big. And it was always positioned to become one, the middleman between users and the Internet. It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested…

Being signed into Google doesn't really figure into Cloudflare's systems at all, haven't for years. They replaced ReCaptcha ages ago.

Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

#40

Post by gexla »

nzeid wrote: post #37

This is definitely as opinionated as an opinion piece can go. Worth mentioning I don't use CF anywhere or care about it... but my employer does. I can really only remember one catastrophic outage. It involved some part of CF that had no redundancy, and the incident was followed by a pretty whiny blog about a data center. That's pretty much it. There were other minor outages but I'm not aware that it affected business…

Just skimmed the article, but the CF your employer used was probably around a lot longer than AI? There's parts of it that can bring everything down. Then there's parts of it that will bring down just what your team(s) put in a load of hard work to build on top of it.
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