That said, I remember when I was rooting for Google against Microsoft and Amazom against Walmart. Before my time people rooted for Microsoft against IBM.
Sometimes we want things to become a little more timeless like Linux or HTML where it is democratized and much freer and slower to chamge.
Cloudflare has to buy, operate, and maintain huge amounts of servers with lots of hard drives, plus all the fiber/copper connecting them across the planet. Linux and HTML are software. They're only "decentralized" in the sense that they don't physically exist anywhere the way that a cloud provider absolutely must.
Another example would be postgres. I can rent postgres, including whatever hardware is used to power it, from AWS, GCP or Azure. Or anybody really, like DigitalOcean or Heroku.
My 'postgres' code will run on every vendors service. The same applies to containers.
That is how I understood the comment 'Linux and HTML', something that is standard and universal, that affords portability and let's vendors compete on quality rather than relying on vendor lockin.
But is there some fundamental obstacle that prevents most cloud services to be delivered by commodity RFC-compliant vendors? Or maybe some glue software layer, that, once you purchase a license, can abstract away the actual provider and make it simply a price decision?
I understand the providers will fight tooth and nail against commoditization, but once the initial wave of innovation and savage competition has passed, do they have a fundamental tool to prevent it?
Those were concrete improvements for customers. Better products and pricing and convenience vs. the incumbents.
So if new companies can do the same thing to Google and Amazon, all the better.
Cloud flare is massive in internet impact and is a publicly traded corporation worth billions. There is nothing small here.
> … and you cringe?
Of course, the end game is exactly the same for cloudflare. A proprietary solution that locks you into their platform instead of AWS’s or GCP’s.
Oh how people have forgotten was open source was about in the 90s and 00s.
But two years from now CloudFlare could be doing the exact same stuff Amazon is doing now, and customers are locked in again, because no source code.
I hear this argument often but it always rings hollow.
A friend had a first gen iPod – when he wanted to switch, he discovered that the music he bought on iTunes couldn't be moved anywhere else because of DRM. That's lock in.
But this morning I was looking at the source code of an app built against the Serverless framework[1] and what I'm seeing is a bog standard WSGI application that uses a library to transform the inbound AWS "proprietary bits" into WSGI[2]. I'm not worried about lock-in there because all API Gateway + Lambda do is "translate an HTTP request into a JSON object and toss it to an app"[3] – what source code am I missing? The underlying Lambda/APIGW code? OK, but do I need it to run it myself? Not really.
Many – most? – AWS products tend towards this analysis. S3 is so locked in that, what, we now have multiple very high quality alternatives that are API compatible?
The real risk of cloud vendor lock in, from where I sit, comes from egregious pricing models that make it cheap to get data in & expensive to push data out. But I'm not sure Cloudflare has the juice to make this play work: egress pricing is essentially free money for AWS, so they've got lots of room to cut costs there – from what I've heard from people who negotiate real bills with AWS, they're very happy to give you discounts there.
[1]: https://github.com/serverless/examples/tree/master/aws-pytho...
[2]: https://github.com/logandk/serverless-wsgi
[3]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide...
The thing that keeps people locked into s3 are egress/bandwidth cost. Until Cloudflare came along, no hosted object store (Google,Azure, including self hosted HDFS onprem or in the cloud) had economical bandwidth/egress costs.
Like if Facebook went full open-source... how does that help, if they retain sole custodianship of my data?
Which means that the REAL question isn't whether they open-source the code (not saying it wouldn't be nice... but it may come with lots of dependencies about their environment that wouldn't be easily replicable elsewhere) but whether their API is open.
And in the case of R2, they mimicked the API for S3. Which is as close to "following a standard" as I think it's possible to get.
Cloudflare is by no means a small hosting provider. By some accounts, cloudflare is world's leading CDN provider by a long margin, far ahead of AWS in this market, and it currently piles up about half a billion dollars in revenue.
https://blog.intricately.com/2020-state-of-the-cdn-industry-...
What Cloudflare is trying to do is remarkable considering what they are up against.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/aws-earnings-q2-2021.html
I repeat, Cloudflare is already the world's leading CDN provider, ahead of AWS by a long margin. This is not a David vs Golias story. At most it's a CDN Golias vs a all-in Golias.
It's disingenuous to compare Cloudflare and it's CDN offering to AWS at face value based on gross revenue. AWS offers everything from build pipelines to satellite ground stations, and even provides backup services comprised of a big truck with armed guards.
Cloudflare is impressive and very successful, but it's by no means a small upstart, specially when it serves a market where it eclipse all competitors, including AWS.
In any case, it kind of is a David vs. Goliath. Cloudflare currently employs ~1800 people and has revenues of under a billion dollars. They don't qualify as a large enterprise by anyone's definition. They aren't a 2-man shop but they are very much a David in the broader market. Amazon is an absolute monstrosity in comparison.
I think this is generally how things are seen. For example, in the Apple vs Epic lawsuit, the judge said the market was "mobile gaming", and that in that space Apple was not a monopoly.
Amazon total revenue adds up, but in each of the cloud categories they operate in, are they the leader?
Note that cloud flare is not fighting against AWS or Amazon but only against the S3 team inside AWS.
Cloudflare's offering does not compete with Lambda at all. They have completely distinct usecases.
Cloudflare Workers at best compete with Lambda@Edge, which in spite of its name is actually a CloudFront feature.
(Disclosure: I'm the tech lead of Workers.)
Based on what I understand, there are still a few things missing to compete with Lambda's asynchronous use-cases. e.g. Step Functions, 15 min time limits, non-cron events (i.e. events for every CF product), batching events into the same execution, etc. While some of these are technically "not part of Lambda", to compete with Lambda CF needs the ecosystem as well.
Disclosure: 1. I'm an AMZN investor, therefore calling out that the ecosystem is worth keeping in mind. 2. I'm a NET investor, therefore calling out that I'm looking forward to seeing the ecosystem develop :)
Google market cap 1.89T
Microsoft market cap 2.289T
Cloudflare market cap 55.86B
Who do you expect to provide competition to Amazon/Google/Microsoft for egress pricing if not smaller company who is a "leading CDN provider" ?
Your comment seems to be justifying why Cloudflare is ideally suited to provide competition against the big 3 cloud providers with its R2 offering ...
Heck, market caps at this point are almost entirely untethered from reality. {cf. Tesla}
Revenues or profits in the cloud market for each company are mostly a measure of how much they are winning. How much they are spending is a measure of how much they are trying to compete, and the amount they can spend is also dependent on profits in other areas of their respective business.
> Heck, market caps at this point are almost entirely untethered from reality
Most stocks have some basis in reality, and relative value still matters even if you think the whole market is in Lala land. The stocks mentioned are not diamondhand stocks. Variation in valuation is not hitting two orders of magnitude, which is what we have here.
A better measure might be some gross profitability figure for each company that measures how much each company can pump into competing (expenses), but that is hard to calculate, especially for Amazon.
[1] Google Cloud Losses Shrink 59%, Revenue Hits $4.6B https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-cloud-losses...
Edited: added second paragraphs.
Amazon 386B USD
Google 183B USD
Microsoft 143B USD
Cloudflare 431M USD
Similar story ...
I don’t understand your argument. A relatively small but innovative company is working to provide competition against the big 3 cloud providers … and you cringe?
Even if their service turns out to be more or less a S3 replicate with better pricing (for some applications involving a fixed amount of data that needs to be widely distributed) it’s a win for consumers and innovation