| > Was this ever an option? Did you consider using other languages besides JavaScript? Like Python or Elixir? I answered a lot of these sorts of questions in the original announcement blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-workers/ The short version is, edge compute calls for an architecture that scales to extremely large numbers of tenants per machine, since every customer wants their code to run in every location. Giving each tenant a whole process does not scale. But we also need secure isolation. So using a JavaScript engine -- built for multi-tenant-per-process secure sandboxing, fast start time, and low overhead -- is pretty much the only reasonable option. > Cloudflare has a history with policing [DS] customers, (Disclaimer: My opinions, I don't speak for my employer.) With respect, I think the history shows the opposite of what you say. Cloudflare has a history of steadfastly refusing to police content, even in the face of intense public pressure to do so, including major press articles essentially calling us Nazi sympathizers. The incident you reference is the only time Cloudflare has ever terminated a customer for objectionable content, and it came with a lengthy explanation from the CEO explaining why he thinks this is dangerous and does not want to do it again. Other cloud infrastructure companies terminate customers like this all the time and don't say anything public about it, so it generates no press. If you don't believe tech company CEOs should be making decisions about what people can and can't say on the internet, then Cloudflare is your ally, not your enemy. > I would therefore argue that decentralization should also be a feature for resilient networks, though it's difficult to implement in your case. There's network decentralization and there's business decentralization. Cloudflare's whole product is network decentralization, on a technical level. But I think what you're arguing for here is business decentralization -- avoiding giving too much power to any one business entity. On that note, keep in mind that Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook are each around 100x the size of Cloudflare on most business metrics. > Btw, does Cloudflare have any serious competitors besides CDN providers? Not sure I understand this question. CDN is a core part of our product, and of course all our competitors are also CDN providers. Why exclude them? |