Very good post. Cloudflare is continuously adding services to their cloud offerings (the latest being Email delivery) in a familiar pattern of "let's make it impossible to switch".
- I want to deploy a tiny service for personal use
- That has occasional requests (think ~10 a day)
- Needs to respond to a few daily events: a CRON job here and there, read an email, webhooks... Think a simpler Zapier
In principle this would be perfect for any of the many cloud function providers.
But AFAIK all of them have this vendor lock-in built into their business model and I just refuse to cave in.
Is there anything that I can do to not lock myself into an edge-computing ecosystem (or whatever this is called in the provider of choice) and still get the benefits? Is there any provider that supports any standard that is not tied specifically to their offering?
BunnyCDN's edge functions are more-or-less standard Deno handlers [0], if that can count as "standard". But generally edge functions means the runtime is given by the provider and so we don't really have a standard for that.
You could try to implement your logic in a WASI-compatible web assembly script - then things like I/O etc are abstracted and "standardised" (and then you can write it in whatever language makes you happy, though Rust will be the happy path in terms of ecosystem).
If you're into self-hosting, you can try Coolify - they take care of the Docker stuff and support all kinds services https://coolify.io/docs/services/overview (including plain Docker/compose deployments). So with this you could probably find a way to own it completely.
Some Cloud functions like lambda support OCI container as a runtime target for example.
I understand that feeling but can be hard a provider that fill all that requirements without a expensive cost.
Integrate with the edge computing is part of the price you pay for all the conveniences like automatic builds, Cron and public reachable endpoints (and some of them almost free).
A minimal VPS with linux is always an alternative.
Non-sequitur. Op comment is not criticizing that they offer another product, but that they offer another proprietary product that furthers locks you into their ecosystem.
- I want to deploy a tiny service for personal use
- That has occasional requests (think ~10 a day)
- Needs to respond to a few daily events: a CRON job here and there, read an email, webhooks... Think a simpler Zapier
In principle this would be perfect for any of the many cloud function providers.
But AFAIK all of them have this vendor lock-in built into their business model and I just refuse to cave in.
Is there anything that I can do to not lock myself into an edge-computing ecosystem (or whatever this is called in the provider of choice) and still get the benefits? Is there any provider that supports any standard that is not tied specifically to their offering?