We raised a bunch of money • Hacker News Board

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#481

Post by jgrahamc » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 10:33 AM UTC

yencabulator wrote: post #470

jgrahamc wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare does not have "regions": your stuff runs everywhere on our network. And we can be really smart about where's the best place: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-workers-smart-placeme...

That sounds like "Cloudflare automated region handling", not that regions don't exist. For example, make your app talk to two backends in different EC2 regions, and now none of the smart placement helps you. The poster we're replying to seems to be gleefully ignorant of speed of light limits and fundamental distributed systems challenges.

No. That’s wrong. We don’t “manage regions”. 300 data centers. Everything running everything. Only time you’d need to think of a region is if you have some compliance situation (“keep all my data in North America” or “only terminate TLS in the EU”) and ask to subdivide our network using Regional Services. But there’s no decision on here you say “I’ll use Cloudflare-EU-North-42” and get stuck with it as no such things exist.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#482

Post by catgirlinspace » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:06 AM UTC

killthebuddha wrote: post #271

It's always seemed to me that Fly has a really awesome, modern perspective on software engineering and that they'd be a great place to work, but I've also always felt like there's a glaring inconsistency between their marketing and product. What I mean is it seems like their marketing (and docs) are all about how trivial it is to spin up globally distributed app servers but the only customers who would need globally…

> ... the only customers who would need globally distributed app servers are almost certainly not worried about spinning up app servers because they've already got extremely mature platforms with globally distributed data stores.

I've been building a little hobby-ish project recently to serve a gaming community I'm in (Splatoon) and I've been using fly.io for it. Being able to run it in multiple regions is useful for this in my opinion because the Splatoon community isn't just concentrated in one place, it's all over. If I hosted in the US then players from Japan would suffer and vice versa.

Even if this little project doesn't go anywhere, I still see it as a (probably) rather useful experience for someday when I'm like, out of school and stuff.

It's really neat to learn about I think. Right now I have it running in the Eastern US, Amsterdam, and Tokyo for about $10/month.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#483

Post by tptacek » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 3:37 PM UTC

OriginalMrPink wrote: post #239

comice wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as the OP says: > but what are you giving away for this? Are founders selling their shares? Where is the beef? $70M can be everything and nothing at the same time.

"Why We Raised A Bunch Of Money" doesn't answer any of the questions above. I've seen private equity rounds disguised as traditional founding rounds, which is neither very transparent, nor very honest. Raising 70M just shortly after a 25M round makes me feel like there was more at play then just 'raising' money tbh. But I might be totally off here - but therefore disclosing a bit more than you currently do might be r…

None of this makes any sense. No PE firm buys a company like Fly.io. I honestly don't understand what either of you are getting at, but I'm confident when I say "you're way off".

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#484

Post by mahmoudimus » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 3:42 PM UTC

kentonv wrote: post #412

skybrian wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Won't see a hint of region anywhere" is an exaggeration. Here's the Durable Objects documentation [1]. Don't those "location hints" look like regions? Also, here's the "Data location" page for Cloudflare D1 [2]. See "available hints" at the bottom. I think it would be more accurate to say that Cloudflare's architecture is designed around having lots of regions, automatic migrations between them, and no guarantee abo…

These are offered more as an escape hatch in case the system doesn't do what you want automatically. But the goal is definitely for the system to do what you want automatically, so that no one ever has to provide these hints. I actually argued against adding these hints at all, since it confuses the messaging and most people don't need them... but they were easy to add and solved an immediate problem for a few custom…

> In other cases we've held firm. For example, some people have wanted to restrict their Workers to run in specific regions because the Worker made lots of requests to a specific back-end in that region. Instead of actually offering explicit hints, we built a system to detect this automatically: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-workers-smart-placeme...

That is an excellent way to design a product. Great job.