[config_yml]

As someone growing up with shared hosting, VPS and eventually K8s, I never really got Cloudflare's offering (apart from CDN/DDOS/DNS). I'm not sure if it's their positioning or if I never had the problems they're trying to solve, but it just doesn't click for me. Durable objects, Wrangler, D1, some custom Node.js API... it's all kind of opaque to me how it really solves any problem better than just using Postgres, Redis, etc on top of K8S or something like that.

[thephyber]

Edge compute.

The workers execute from the same colos as the CDN, which are regionally distributed. They respond fast because they are physically close to the visitor and CloudFlare limits which runtimes they support to only very highly optimized ones.

And for my money, any platform that doesn’t require K8s is superior thank any which does.

[jimbohn]

Same for me, these things you mentioned either felt like stuff for edge or "convoluted hobby project", with maybe some cv padding along. Perhaps we need to buy into the full ecosystem to understand the value.

[jonathanlydall]

Cloudflare seems to exclusively offer "serverless" products, which rules out applications like Postgres (or any other "standard" database technology).

Why don't they just offer "managed Postgres"? This is because their infrastructure is as homogenized as possible so does not offer hosting of arbitrary services or software, the only customizable code made available to customers are things like workers which are deliberately constrained (in execution time, resource usage, etc) to, again, allow them to keep all their infrastructure as homogenized as possible.

Most of their other products are to provide supplementary capabilities to workers.

For example, their durable objects are comparable (in terms of technical approach, problems they solve and trade-offs) to AWS's DynamoDB or Azure's Cosmos DB. These products are distributed by nature and work very well for certain kinds of projects and not so well for others. They're also fully in-line with the generally homogenous infrastructure that Cloudflare is engineered to work on.

In summary, Cloudflare has essentially homogenous infrastructure globally and is able to make their extensive edge infrastructure available to customers for customized applications by constraining it to "serverless" offerings. For customers that can work within the trade-offs of these serverless products, it's an appealing product.

[seec]

It's just marketing bullshit. Make no mistake, the people using those things don't understand much more than you do; they are just going after shiny new toys, because that's much easier than building something solid that lasts and is cost-effective.