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I'm Joining CloudFlare

words.steveklabnik.com

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Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#11

Post by StavrosK »

I greatly enjoyed the "state of the union" summary on WebAssembly, and I liked how cleverly it was disguised as a new job announcement. This sounds like a dream job (at least for me), and it prompted me to look into edge computing and WASM/WASI more seriously. Thanks for the article, Steve, and good luck!

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#13

Post by whoisjuan »

FYI, AWS Lambda can, and for many things, does run on edge locations (166 edge points). So your comparison is not very accurate. The right map to use on that comparison would be a CloudFront map.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#15

Post by steveklabnik »

whoisjuan wrote: post #13

FYI, AWS Lambda can, and for many things, does run on edge locations (166 edge points). So your comparison is not very accurate. The right map to use on that comparison would be a CloudFront map.

I mentioned Lambda@Edge, but I knew less about that; I'll add a note and see if I can find a CloudFront map, thank you!

EDIT: Fixed, thank you! I meant to double check this and just forgot before hitting publish :(

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#16

Post by jxcl »

whoisjuan wrote: post #13

FYI, AWS Lambda can, and for many things, does run on edge locations (166 edge points). So your comparison is not very accurate. The right map to use on that comparison would be a CloudFront map.

I was super excited to try out Lambda@Edge with Rust a few weeks ago but discovered that right now, Lambda@Edge only supports Node.js. It's a pretty major limitation of the platform.

(Although since Rust can compile to WASM, it might be possible to write Rust, compile it to WASM, load that WASM in Node and run that on Lambda@Edge.)

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#17

Post by devit »

Regarding the WebAssembly part, it seems to me that native Linux code sandboxed by seccomp would work just as well if not better, and has been available since 2005 (and there's also NaCL if you want in-process, as well as a bunch of VMs).

So I think the reason for "CloudFlare workers" not being available ten years ago has to be found somewhere else.

Re: I'm Joining CloudFlare

#19

Post by steveklabnik »

devit wrote: post #17

Regarding the WebAssembly part, it seems to me that native Linux code sandboxed by seccomp would work just as well if not better, and has been available since 2005 (and there's also NaCL if you want in-process, as well as a bunch of VMs). So I think the reason for "CloudFlare workers" not being available ten years ago has to be found somewhere else.

There's pros and cons, like anything else. For some more details about why specifically Workers uses V8 and Isolates, I recommend this talk: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/cloudflare-v8

Specifically,

> But the kind of scalability I'm talking about here is scalability to the number of tenants, the number of applications that we can be hosting at one time. The challenge with this is that, again, we don't want people to choose one or two or five locations where their software runs; we want it to run everywhere. We want everyone's code running in every one of our locations. And some of our locations are not that big. Though some have lots and lots of computers, but others have maybe a dozen machines. How do you fit- we have 10 million customers- on a dozen machines? Turns out that the existing technologies for this, the existing server-side technologies, don't live up to the task. What we really need is basically 100X efficiency gain in number of people we can host and 100X decrease in how many resources each one is using.

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