[sudhirj]

zackbloom you’ve made your point already, but remember that these posts represent a moving target. AWS could crush CF performance on pretty much all these numbers with a few configuration changes, which they might well do. And you’re not acknowledging the rest of the Lambda moat, like SQS integration, free S3 bandwidth etc.

Workers has a clear advantage over Lambda@Edge, but not because of the current resource configuration differences across the two products - the advantage is your choice of V8 and adoption of the Service Worker API standard, which brilliantly outshines the L@Edge API choices. Harp on that, most of what you’re talking about now will likely be invalidated by the next reinvent, and they’ll make it a point to tell the world.

[kentonv]

> AWS could crush CF performance on pretty much all these numbers with a few configuration change

Eh? I can see how they could match Workers' raw CPU throughput by simply turning off throttling. But how would they "crush" it? And how can they easily improve other performance measures like network latency, cold start time, or deploy time? Honestly curious what you're getting at here.

> the advantage is your choice of V8 and adoption of the Service Worker API standard, which brilliantly outshines the L@Edge API choices.

Thanks for the kind words.

[sudhirj]

Because the pure geographic latency numbers are quite comparable. Workers latency when compared to Lambda@Edge/CloudFront isn't that different, and is also a moving target because both of you are adding locations all over the world continuously and buying more and more local racks. There's no clear winner here.

Cold start time is fixable, there's already been large improvements, and this is more a VPC problem. Easiest way would be to overprovision aggressively / make sure Lambdas tied to APIGW always have lambda running, or ever use some variation of ML predictions to keep things warm. But again, this isn't comparable - Lambda is a truck compared to Workers/Lambda@Edge being bikes. Parallel scalability is more important there than speed. There are enough ways to keep a few warm ones ready.

Deploy time is really download time from S3, AWS could cache more aggressively on the local cloudfront caches. I'm not seeing deployment time as being a big factor, though.

By "crush" I mean make claims about performance irrelevant. To claim that AWS cannot equalize performance between Lambda@Edge and Workers doesn't make sense, they can. And they can improve Lambda price-performance as well, and are already doing so. I'm saying this cannot and is not the Workers USP - no one in the AWS ecosystem is going to jump to Workers based on this because it lacks the rest of the AWS ecosystem.

> > the advantage is your choice of V8 and adoption of the Service Worker API standard, which brilliantly outshines the L@Edge API choices.

That's really the big differentiator for Workers. I think you should blow that trumpet a lot more. If you only publicize performance numbers, what happens to the Workers story when that advantage is lost?

> Thanks for the kind words.

You made a good decision and built something great, you're welcome.

[penagwin]

Hello, I know you're the tech lead for the web workers at cloudflare so pardon my ignorance if I'm wrong.

At least for pure computer speed, I think he means that if you (cloudflare) and AWS got into an arms race in terms of allocated CPU/Memory to the webworkers/lambda, they have more raw resources to do so. They also have a global presence, not necessarily to the degree that you do obviously.

I highly doubt they would do this, and I think you have the superior product. I'm just a student/hobbyist so I admittedly don't have a ton of experience. I'm very biased towards CF, you guys are great! :D

[zackbloom]

Honestly, if that's what happens and Lambda end up priced more reasonably because of us I would consider that a victory, and a lovely outcome for the world.

That said, I also want people to build applications which run all around the world. I can only imagine what it's like for people in Australia to browse the modern Internet, but I doubt it's particularly fun and I'd like to help fix it if I can.