NGINX was great for us for a long time. But there comes a time where your needs and their future plans diverge. We couldn’t keep maintaining a fork and we had features that would have meant a huge effort to shoehorn into the NGINX architecture.
And NGINX is written in C and we really wanted to use less memory-unsafe languages after Cloudbleed.
This is a massive segue, but where would memory-unsafe languages be acceptable for use at Cloudflare? I'm assuming existing software that needs to be maintained would be one of the them but what about low-level firmware, kernel code, and so on? Would Rust would a replacement to C in those areas too?
Yes I understand. I’m not complaining about you writing Oxy I’m complaining about the proprietary license after you derived so much value from Open Source, same as the parent comment.
> Oxy heavily relies on open-source dependencies, with hyper and tokio being the backbone of the framework
It seems almost every single production async framework uses tokio instead of async-std. Has tokio won? Is there a reason in 2023 not to use tokio as the async base?
Deno has periodically had open github issues or ideas where there's possible paths but tied to Tokio & they seem to want to leave the door open for now. Just one tiny data point but I find it interesting.
While it is interesting that they achieved a technical feat, is there any reason for this article to be here? It teaches us nothing apart from the fact that Cloudflare did a thing.
At the simplest level the answer is... someone posted this to HN and other users upvoted it enough for it to reach the front page.
We write things up for one main reason: find new employees. We want people to know what sorts of things we work on. So we try to explain them in a lot of detail. A secondary reason is that it's sometimes helpful to learn how someone else solved a problem. Real world examples can be helpful and sometimes more helpful than abstract discussions.
> We write things up for one main reason: find new employees.
JFC, vomit in my shirt, gross.
What kind of Ayn Randian misery world do you live in? I think a lot of people write things because they think it's interesting & worth discussing & has merit. It doesn't necessarily have to be for self or corporate gain. It's ok if people just want to help other people, want to share? No? Yes? Is it so objectionable that we have a broader human cause, that we want people to do well & know more & understand better? Do we have to reduce everything to the utmost petty corporatistic parasitism?
Or just more broadly: can we not ascribe motive so quickly, with such cocky self-assurity? (Especially to such incredibly vulgar/short ends?) Let's leave some possibility of intent open, yeah, please?
You think the person you’re replying to is slandering Cloudflare by saying they write blog posts primarily to build their brand among potential hires.
I don’t think he’s slandering Cloudflare. I think he’s captured their intent well. I say this because jgrahamc is the CTO of Cloudflare. He has been for years.
I haven’t read any Ayn Rand so I’m not totally sure what that means but, as I said, the main reason Cloudflare has a blog like that is to attract new employees.
Of course, there are all sorts of others reasons such as giving our employees the satisfaction of having their work made public, helping them write better, hopefully making potential customers think we are cool and want to buy stuff, getting feedback from the outside world (I particularluly love the “why didn’t they do X” type comments because sometimes we learn something useful) and so on.
That's basically what all technical blogs from corporations does. I suppose they imagine we'd learn something it.
I concur with the other commentator, bit disappointing it's not OSS, guess they are afraid of helping the competition. I did expect a "and you can give it a try here" section in the end.
We're not afraid of helping the competition. Example: we open sourced the entire runtime for Cloudflare Workers! https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
Open sourcing something has a cost and we mostly only open source things like stand-alone libraries. We also mostly open source things that are fairly mature because it's hard to manage software that's rapidly changing internally and handle PRs from outside.
You did mention on your Pingora post months ago that that would be open-sourced eventually though. Is that still the case? Is Oxy entirely separate from those plans?
What kind of corporate but tech stuff do people find interesting? Curious, im looking to write more to practice but idk exactly what kind of stuff people are interested or what level of technical information they want too. Interested in anyones answers
Will be interested to see why I would use this instead of Envoy or similar FOSS. One obvious thing would be giving the operational work to Cloudflare instead of doing it myself, but beyond that it reads like "we built an internal thing in Rust."
The value-based price model at Cloudflare is a big turn off. Don't expect that all the Enterprise features are ready to be used in your Enterprise account. I can't remember that I have seen this feature in any Enterprise account.
With GCP, Azure and AWS you at least have an idea of what you are paying for. Cloudflare is more up to how lucky you got with your AM.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] thread[1]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=oxy
edit: also, for some reason - this older song came to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEYwmfd65C8
I figured with this type of blog post the finale would be, and everyone can try it out at…
Hopefully they do release it OSS eventually.
They open sourced a few bits, but those were both mid-last year. I'd say quiche is more interesting than boring.
Flowing water kills people too, so what are your thoughts on network flows as a term?
And NGINX is written in C and we really wanted to use less memory-unsafe languages after Cloudbleed.
It seems almost every single production async framework uses tokio instead of async-std. Has tokio won? Is there a reason in 2023 not to use tokio as the async base?
- Tokio 12.1M
- Async-std 1.6M
It’s an order of magnitude difference.
We write things up for one main reason: find new employees. We want people to know what sorts of things we work on. So we try to explain them in a lot of detail. A secondary reason is that it's sometimes helpful to learn how someone else solved a problem. Real world examples can be helpful and sometimes more helpful than abstract discussions.
> We write things up for one main reason: find new employees.
JFC, vomit in my shirt, gross.
What kind of Ayn Randian misery world do you live in? I think a lot of people write things because they think it's interesting & worth discussing & has merit. It doesn't necessarily have to be for self or corporate gain. It's ok if people just want to help other people, want to share? No? Yes? Is it so objectionable that we have a broader human cause, that we want people to do well & know more & understand better? Do we have to reduce everything to the utmost petty corporatistic parasitism?
Or just more broadly: can we not ascribe motive so quickly, with such cocky self-assurity? (Especially to such incredibly vulgar/short ends?) Let's leave some possibility of intent open, yeah, please?
I don’t think he’s slandering Cloudflare. I think he’s captured their intent well. I say this because jgrahamc is the CTO of Cloudflare. He has been for years.
Of course, there are all sorts of others reasons such as giving our employees the satisfaction of having their work made public, helping them write better, hopefully making potential customers think we are cool and want to buy stuff, getting feedback from the outside world (I particularluly love the “why didn’t they do X” type comments because sometimes we learn something useful) and so on.
I concur with the other commentator, bit disappointing it's not OSS, guess they are afraid of helping the competition. I did expect a "and you can give it a try here" section in the end.
Open sourcing something has a cost and we mostly only open source things like stand-alone libraries. We also mostly open source things that are fairly mature because it's hard to manage software that's rapidly changing internally and handle PRs from outside.
(I would have named it something else.)
Edit: Enterprise account only .
With GCP, Azure and AWS you at least have an idea of what you are paying for. Cloudflare is more up to how lucky you got with your AM.
Products > Cloudflare Zero Trust > … > Add non-HTTP applications > Arbitrary TCP
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/application...
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=roxy (2nd entry)