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A Biography of Lee Holloway, the Architect of Cloudflare's Technology (Part 1)

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Re: A Biography of Lee Holloway, the Architect of Cloudflare's Technology (Part 1)

#22

Post by thelastgallon »

Discussed before:

What happened to Lee? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22878136

I remember this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22883548

Saving a click:

I posted this hours ago and then stepped away. The story captures so much about the Lee I knew so well. I'll add one piece of praise for Lee's early architecture of Cloudflare.

Everything was controlled by a single Postgres database that made very heavy use of stored procedures, that called other procedures, that called others. It was one giant program inside the database. It took me a while to comprehend what he'd done but it was really great. The database ran everything and all those functions made sure that audit logs were kept, that the calls were allowed for the user ID being passed in, and some of these procedures made external calls to APIs including getting things like SSL certificates.

It was a magnificent monolith inside a database.

I worked on the periphery of the database (it was truly Lee's domain) and he'd tell me what output to expect or API to create and I'd code to his spec. and we'd just hook it up.

If any single artefact represents what he did at Cloudflare, it's that database. And he used to code it on a laptop we called "The Beast" because it was so crazily heavy and overloaded with memory etc. that he'd carry around a mini, test Cloudflare wherever he went.

Re: A Biography of Lee Holloway, the Architect of Cloudflare's Technology (Part 1)

#23

Post by jgrahamc »

thelastgallon wrote: post #22

Discussed before: What happened to Lee? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22878136 I remember this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22883548 Saving a click: I posted this hours ago and then stepped away. The story captures so much about the Lee I knew so well. I'll add one piece of praise for Lee's early architecture of Cloudflare. Everything was controlled by a single Postgres database that made very…

Thanks for reposting that. Re-reading my own words made me well up a bit at the memories of that time and working with him. And the final technical meeting I had with him where I couldn't understand why he was being oddly stubborn about an API definition. Looking back it was all part of his illness.

Re: A Biography of Lee Holloway, the Architect of Cloudflare's Technology (Part 1)

#24

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Strange that they claim Lee pioneered Anycast usage. Anycast was created when Lee was 2 years old. Afaik, CacheFly was the first big CDN to make Anycast edge networks back in 2002, along with EdgeCast in 2006, then Microsoft, Limelight, etc.

The "Cell architecture" is also an old idea we used back in 2006. First install all your software on all your nodes. Then have an agent on the box poll a custom REST API endpoint that looks up the host in the CMDB/IMDB and generates a config file. That config file is stored on the box and used to inform a CM tool to start the services that box should be running. You run multiple different network and app services per box to maximize the hardware in use, so you don't have idle nodes wasting money, power and rack space (the redundancy is a bonus/efficiency gain)

Sounds like a talented guy. Terrible to hear what happened to him.

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