[nrmitchi]

This is probably going to go somewhere, and it's good to see Netlify get some more competition, but this announcement kind of lost me at:

> There are no great solutions.

Therea are plenty of existing solutions here that do pretty much the same thing, including Netlify, Vercel, and going all the way back to Heroku.

Cloudflare is expanding their product line, which is fine, but lets not pretend that this is some brand new ground-breaking deployment methodology.

[no_wizard]

There is some marketing here to be sure, but in some sense, they are at least partially right in that:

- they aren’t just reselling AWS services (if I recall correctly Netlify and to at least some extent Vercel do, for instance)

- They will be providing their own database platform (coming soon according to the blog post, as of 12/17/2020) which means they can provide the ability to have a single end to end provider for my app. (Interested to know if CloudFlare will provide a secure user authentication layer on top)

- they have one of the world's largest CDNs, no other player really offers that out of the box (though you can just as easily integrate with theirs, it’s just not as convenient and I’m sure the integration there will play out accordingly)

- They are offering workers out of the box, which are a lot like lambdas, in that they run some arbitrary function(s) when called, but have greater capabilities beyond that with the system since they are “CloudFlare Aware”

It’s not all untrue, however:

To your point, it’s very much a marketing message vs a hard reality in that services offer a good deal of feature parity and this is more of a leap in the current iteration of things rather than a pure innovation in the problem space. You can readily achieve this today with some combination of Heroku + CloudFlare CDN, for instance (and that would include edge workers, if you so choose)

I imagine this wouldn't be terribly hard to emulate with AWS Amplify[0] either, though. I like that CloudFlare is offering something not directly tied to AWS or another cloud provider explicitly (I'm not talking about them using it for extra compute or what have you. I know that CloudFlare has their own network of servers and generally they're selling access to their metal, not another provider(s))

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/

[nrmitchi]

Yes, Cloudflare's offering here has promises of adding more functionality in the future, but I don't think that changes my point. At the moment, it is fundamentally the same as existing tools.

"Worker" functionality is already available on both Netlify and Vercel.

Cloudflare's version will obviously have a tighter integration into the rest of Cloudflare.

I've written up a summary of tools/options in this space in the past (but it is a bit out-of-date, but space is moving fast). Including Cloudflare Pages, I now count 6 platform-add-on features that cover all of this functionality.

https://www.nrmitchi.com/2020/10/state-of-continuous-product...

[TimTheTinker]

It is fundamentally different: concerning service offerings, your static site and your edge cache can both be handled by CloudFlare.

Maybe that’s a nitpick, but it probably feels earth-shattering to some, because it recategorizes CloudFlare as a first-class hosting provider (and soon-to-be application and database layer), not just a cache. Sort of like how Redis is now a first-class database, at least according to them.

Personally, I’m excited about this because it finally represents an edge someone has (no pun intended) that could compete with AWS’s services for JAMStack-style sites and apps.

[elithrar]

> "Worker" functionality is already available on both Netlify and Vercel.

Workers at those providers do not run _at the edge_ for each request. They lean on AWS Lambda to pre-generate or render assets, but you can't reliably run a function there on every user-facing request without a noticeable latency penalty.

[edaemon]

Vercel's functions do run at the edge, but Netlify's are just AWS Lambda functions.

[oapsi]

How is this different than Vercel? We already has a big CF account so it would be easy to move there (we have a bunch of Stackbit sites that are currently deployed on Vercel)

[twelve40]

> no other player really offers that out of the box

S3 + cloudfront?

[Terretta]

> ... lets not pretend that this is some brand new ground-breaking ... methodology

Except this script has been working very well.

It makes all kinds of sense for CloudFlare to simply declare a reality where features are novel and their offering is the only one relevant.

Scaled stability is hard, scaled awareness of technical solutions is hard, so ... tech chops + reality distortion field = potent.

[dataminded]

I can only speak to Netlify and Vercel, both really good steps forward but very immature solutions.