8 ms·

It's cool that it's open-source, but how much effort and scale would it take to run it on non cloud flare infra?

by vavos 1mo ago

tstrimple 1mo ago
ffs there is literally no pleasing some people. "Hosting an open source project is too difficult! They should provide a free SaaS solution instead on their own cost but also no lock-in!!"
- Rapzid 1mo ago
  High switching costs is a form of lock-in "open source" or not.. This is something people with real experience making real decisions are well aware of..
- tyre 1mo ago
  I think it’s a legitimate question! Some companies operate at such a scale that if you tried to adopt their tools or services, it would be way too complex for the ROI. Think Bazel or how K8s was for ~ever. For Google’s scale? Required. For a small team? A net-negative.
  - kentonv 1mo ago
    workerd stand-alone is designed to work well at small-medium scale. If we open sourced Cloudflare's production scheduler, nobody would be able to use it because it is explicitly designed for HUGE, globe-spanning scale. Well, nobody except our direct competitors. But the goal with workerd is actually that it should be pretty easy to run, about as easy as Node. Stateless workloads should scale trivially (just add more instances and load balance). For Durable Objects (statefull), currently it doesn't scale well at all, but I'm working on changes[0] so that it scales nicely across a cluster. I intentionally chose a design here that is operationally easy to set up. (Basically: just connect all the nodes to NFSv4.) [0] https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/6780 https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/6780
- potamic 1mo ago
  Adopting a new technology often needs a lot of consideration. People will have a lot of questions, want to understand the implications and discuss with the hive mind. No need to attack them for that, I think.
  - elicash 1mo ago
    I think tstrimple incorrectly thought it was a rhetorical question really meant to complain. But my interpretation was like yours, that it was good faith and a literal question.
- csomar 1mo ago
  Open Source is a marketing term if your solution takes $2m worth of compute or devops time in order to run properly. The idea is, you have a way out if you want to leave. An option. But if leaving costs $x,xxx,xxx then that option was never there for most people. One example is NextJS. It's open source but even CloudFlare couldn't figure out how to run it properly on their platform.
  - kentonv 1mo ago
    It does not cost $2m of compute to run an instance of Cloudflare OS. I am running it on a random server in my basement.
    - AlotOfReading 1mo ago
      Another year or two of RAM shortages should go a long way to closing that gap.

It's cool that it's open-source, but how much effort and scale would it take to run it on non cloud flare infra?

by vavos 1mo ago

It's cool that it's open-source, but how much effort and scale would it take to run it on non cloud flare infra?

ffs there is literally no pleasing some people. "Hosting an open source project is too difficult! They should provide a free SaaS solution instead on their own cost but also no lock-in!!"

Rapzid 1mo ago
High switching costs is a form of lock-in "open source" or not.. This is something people with real experience making real decisions are well aware of..
tyre 1mo ago
I think it’s a legitimate question! Some companies operate at such a scale that if you tried to adopt their tools or services, it would be way too complex for the ROI. Think Bazel or how K8s was for ~ever. For Google’s scale? Required. For a small team? A net-negative.
- kentonv 1mo ago
  workerd stand-alone is designed to work well at small-medium scale. If we open sourced Cloudflare's production scheduler, nobody would be able to use it because it is explicitly designed for HUGE, globe-spanning scale. Well, nobody except our direct competitors. But the goal with workerd is actually that it should be pretty easy to run, about as easy as Node. Stateless workloads should scale trivially (just add more instances and load balance). For Durable Objects (statefull), currently it doesn't scale well at all, but I'm working on changes[0] so that it scales nicely across a cluster. I intentionally chose a design here that is operationally easy to set up. (Basically: just connect all the nodes to NFSv4.) [0] https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/6780 https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/6780
potamic 1mo ago
Adopting a new technology often needs a lot of consideration. People will have a lot of questions, want to understand the implications and discuss with the hive mind. No need to attack them for that, I think.
- elicash 1mo ago
  I think tstrimple incorrectly thought it was a rhetorical question really meant to complain. But my interpretation was like yours, that it was good faith and a literal question.
csomar 1mo ago
Open Source is a marketing term if your solution takes $2m worth of compute or devops time in order to run properly. The idea is, you have a way out if you want to leave. An option. But if leaving costs $x,xxx,xxx then that option was never there for most people. One example is NextJS. It's open source but even CloudFlare couldn't figure out how to run it properly on their platform.
- kentonv 1mo ago
  It does not cost $2m of compute to run an instance of Cloudflare OS. I am running it on a random server in my basement.
  - AlotOfReading 1mo ago
    Another year or two of RAM shortages should go a long way to closing that gap.