> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better
There wasn't. Cloudflare is a cancer grown too big. And it was always positioned to become one, the middleman between users and the Internet.
It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries?
>It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries?
If it's painful, that's not because of cloudflare. You can get past turnstile challenges using tor browser in a VM. You still might be blocked because of policies set by site owners, but that can hardly be blamed on cloudflare.
Genuine good faith question, what would you recommend the solution or alternative to be? How could we be able to get the benefits Cloudflare provides, without the inherent drawbacks?
The general arguments here are that CDNs have replaced tier1 ISPs as the predominant force on the Internet. Geoff Huston has written about this over the last ~10 years[0][1].
So the question as to alternatives is void - the problem is CDNs MitM'ing yur datas across multiple domains, and the loss of the nostalgia (or whatever) for the tier1 ISPs (who were all horrible in their own ways).
I don't particularly subscribe to the harms Geoff purports, but I cannot fault his analysis of the situation. If you haven't read it before, it is worth the read.
If you want a free and open Internet, then you don't want someone else's TLS proxy between every consumer and every producer. This ignores the problems of DDoS, scaling, etc. Buuutttttt.... 99% of websites don't have those problems, so why are you building a solution which trades decentralization for it?
Anyhow, sounds like you're into all the wonderful things Cloudflare (and every other CDN) provides. Great. That's fine, just don't be angry when the free and open Internet promised to all of us in the 1990s requires 3rd party gate keepers. And no, there aren't solutions to all the problems.
It could be but proposing a standard and getting it adopted by everyone else is its own monopolistic behavior. Everyone here shits the bed when google tries to do it for ad measurement and decloaking
It works off PoW, so all you need is a vaguely working js/wasm runtime. It won't fail you if it detects you as spoofing user agent, or are running a "weird" browser like servo on freebsd (or whatever). All of this is "good" for being non-discriminatory, but it also means it's pretty easy for baddies to implement hardware accelerated solvers that can solve challenges orders of magnitude faster than any user can, and at a fraction of resources required (because they don't need a full browser).
Hard disagree. Sure their docs are bad, and it's sometimes buggy. But to me cloudflare is actually innovating and trying to offer "new" infrastructure. Durable objects and workers are super cool. R2 has free egress, isn't it insane that they could pull that off?
If what you want is a VM to run postgres then there are other offerings that would be much better.
Not saying they aren't evil though, they probably are, but the infra stuff is cool.
I disagree with your disagreement. I wrote the post and I am not blaming the innovation. I am blaming the chaos of innovation. Everything feels DISJOINTED.
The innovation is useful, the delivery of the innovation is the pitfall here.
What’s missed from the post is that Cloudflare for many years now has felt that they are a “Cloud 2.0” company.
And AWS/GCP/etc are “Cloud 1.0”.
They believe that AI Agent will fundamentally change the internet, and it’s hard to fault them for seeing it that way when their own stats shows that bot/agents account for the majority of Internet traffic.
As such, going all in on AI fits into their thesis of being “Cloud 2.0”.
Cloudflare failed pre-AI with Cloudbleed, which could have been alright except for how they initially handled it. In addition, a few checks & balances have retired or stepped back so there's nothing stopping AI amplification of that company culture.
They may succeed or not, but right now it's hard to stomach as a former fan. I see where a blog post like this could be coming from.
I have to say: Yes, there is a lot of velocity from Cloudflare pushing out AI-adjacent features as of late.
But also: What they've doing with Workers et al. has made them a platform for fully-fledged apps and deployments. I personally love the ecosystem and use it for all of my projects now. It's like the perfect blend of ease-of-use and DX of Heroku, and breadth of services of AWS / GCP. Well, maybe not quite AWS or GCP, but that's kind of the point -- they've created an opinionated system of "objects" that are all highly extensible to the point where in my opinion you can pretty much deploy anything you want on it.
It took me a bit of time to learn the "Cloudflare way" of doing things, but once I started making on it I saw just how flexible (and low cost!) everything is.
It sounds like a blog post in support of a slowdown for product releases. But the reality is there are multiple companies trying to capture the attention of the same market.
Maybe 2 years ago it would’ve been acceptable to release the product internally, slowly add features, dogfood it, then open to public a year later. But now someone else will release the same product within a month, get sticky customers, and most likely won’t switch.
It’s much easier and faster to release features, so once anyone sees a competition gaining some attention, they just copy the same feature. Which, i think, is fair.
It’s easy to blame the org, but the market is extremely competitive right now. Kind of race to the bottom, except the hardware parts, which have different constraints right now.
Hi, I wrote the post, I think blaming the org for releasing things that aren't engineered/created with "love" (including docs, examples, long-term planning and a roadmap of improvement that will follow-on), and suitable for production, without labeling them as beta, is in fact detrimental to the status of a company's image.
AWS/GCP/Azure are full of abandonware. I’m more familiar with the AWS-side of things, and most of them were/are built on top of existing core services. AWS’s/GCP’s image is fine. I’d say as long as CF’s core (CDN/DDoS mitigation/etc.) is stable, they should experiment.
To put it this way, it took GH almost a year to release Stacked PRs to public. And it’s already being questioned if it’ll stand the test of time. Again, insanely competitive market, as everyone wants to sell shovels.
This is definitely as opinionated as an opinion piece can go. Worth mentioning I don't use CF anywhere or care about it... but my employer does.
I can really only remember one catastrophic outage. It involved some part of CF that had no redundancy, and the incident was followed by a pretty whiny blog about a data center.
That's pretty much it. There were other minor outages but I'm not aware that it affected business.
Despite the disclaimer I think the author should explain precisely how "AI product mindset" or whatever is actually translating to bad outcomes.
Just skimmed the article, but the CF your employer used was probably around a lot longer than AI? There's parts of it that can bring everything down. Then there's parts of it that will bring down just what your team(s) put in a load of hard work to build on top of it.
The blog implies that CF's core business is suffering because of added investment in what the author describes as AI. See their useEffect bug as an example.
EDIT: To be clear, my employer still uses CF and I don't see any evidence that it's gotten worse.
Cloudflare's UI is basically the web equivalent of the git CLI.
Powerful, but the densest collection of UI anti-patterns known to man.
Their "designers" obviously walked up hill both ways in the snow to school every day while being eaten by a walrus and feel anyone who doesn't enjoy a suitably opaque navigation scheme isn't worth acknowledging.
> Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great
They want to eat at the AI table, given that they are not producing models or GPUs and not building datacentres, they try with the product. But we are still in the early stage so it's not clear what will work and what not, so they have to try as much as possible.
Hey everyone, author here, I am very frustrated with the state of Cloudflare and I posted this blog the other day on my blog and here on HN (but generated no discussion), thanks for re-posting it, I am gonna start reading the comments and start replying
Likely to the AI labs and hyperscalers? Given the insane growth and level of expenditure I assume it’s a fun place where to work (assuming you’re ok contributing actively to the AI industry)
> First of all tons of more outages than ever, remember that React useEffect fkup [0]? Complete insane that this would happen at an infra company that runs a third or so of the web.
Bugs happen all the time. They roughly increase with scale, not decrease. There’s an argument to be made about better testing, but this specific bug seems like a perfect one to slip through: multiple services, hard to spot at code review, involves JS/frontend, invisible at low traffic (test/UT envs).
So IMO it’s not completely insane. Is the implication that Cloudflare should have no bugs whatsoever?
If outages are increasing with scale you get 1 or maybe 2 free passes.
After that you either have in-ept Engineering or just in-ept leadership.
I used to be all in on CF a while ago, now I am moving off them almost entirely.
Same issue with GitHub, I can understand if you can't build for the scale when you couldn't predict it but if after over 12-18 months things don't seem to be improving what are you even doing?
I honestly think all of these companies are deluded if they think people will stick around with all these weekly outage events.
I have a homelab server I have had 2 outages in 1 year because my shitty ISP went down. Still at 99.9% uptime, I have done nothing special.
I now have backup internet as well.
Is it big? Nope but it doesn't need to be cf scale.
And scale is the reason to use these services why would I use cloudflare if a homelab would have been enough?
If they aren't designing and scaling their systems to handle this scale they might as well close shop, someone else might do it better.
As a infra/dev person who does his own thing on the side, I might be the most impacted by these outages, so I might be coming off as harsh. But they cost me both time/money and headache in extra development work.
Imagine prod deploys are down for 2 days why? Because GitHub actions keep failing...
Oh serving new OTA updates broke? Why? dig into the code.. go oncall with users instead of doing work, realize it's a CF outage and the writes failed.
(Feel the tears streaming down your face).
If I have to waste dev time, with AI and me together we could self host it with higher reliability with significantly cheaper costs at this point even at fairly decent scale.
I think any infra company that has more than 1 outage a year is already not worth investing in.
But more than 3 and you might be better off self hosting, even in this ram apocalypse.
If all people in SF are this unserious about reliability (which hasn't been my experience but HN seems especially open to break the prod if you have to)
Then well software companies really do deserve to be replaced by AI.
This might be rude but this is the reason we have shitty software everywhere. The "there can always be a bug, get over it mindset" is the reason software sucks, everything needs a dozen patches to even work and no one can have any peace in this business.
I honestly don't even want to debate this because I see no point, as honestly the side that would have said outages shouldn't happen is dead buried and out of a job at this point.
But,
> Saying “you’re not serious if you have more than 1 bug a year” is silly.
> Outages are just a specific kind of bug, often surfaced by the interactions of several discrete bugs.
Several bugs or 1 bug? you decide and tell me, when you have made up your mind.
Outages happen as a result of the system's design being shoddy in the first place, and an attitude where bugs shipped are acceptable because it's only a single component, rest of the system shouldn't fail.
It won't go down was the entire thing with microservices and "the cloud" I could link some blogs and brochures if you want me to.
I am honestly over the moon with these conversations on HN, really proves the point why AI is rightly replacing engineers in software, because there wasn't any engineering to begin with.
Imagine if a civil engineer said bridges fall it's fine for a few bridges to fall because bugs happen, and honestly bridge falling is just a kind of bug where several discrete bugs happened at once.
I am certain there is some room to argue about it, but what is clear is that if it was happening every single month you would have stopping using bridges unless absolutely necessary.
I am not sure if there is ever a reply for this honestly, I honestly don't even blame the people just the culture at this point. If that's what software is to some, "something that can fail at any time" and cloud's selling point is just fewer "switches to flip" I am sure I can't change that.
But I won't be deluded into thinking that software outages are just an everyday "bug" and it's fine to have several outages a year, it is the normal mode of operation in-fact no harm done.
> Outages happen as a result of the system's design being shoddy in the first place, and an attitude where bugs shipped are acceptable because it's only a single component, rest of the system shouldn't fail.
This is correct for some classes of failure but not others. If your authorization system goes down, should you just let any request pass? No.
You also need to fail correctly. If we extend the civil engineering analogy, then that would mean fail safely.
Two trains derailed in the UK last week. Should we all abandon trains? No? Why do plane crashes happen? That’s the most safety conscious area for software and hardware.
Because failures happen. Everyone expects them. Bridges don’t last forever, they know they will fail after a specific time frame and so they design around that. Planes have triplicate systems everywhere. And yet, despite all this, failures still happen.
And the fact they know that bridges have specific failure modes and lifespans is the result of a long, long history of bridges failing.
I don’t understand the impulse to whine and complain about the aesthetics of a big company.
> a little more cringey and clique
Why on earth do I care if someone thinks Cloudflare is cringe? What is interesting about that? They are following the market like everyone else.
> Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great…They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive to speed up external Postgres or MySQL.
What does this have to do with AI psychosis? I thought that was the thesis of this article? As I said, it’s just directionless complaining.
What values and principles are supposed to be preventing cloudflare, the internet and technology company, from exploring hot new internet markets and technologies?
Because it affects people personally? They are using the stuff that's being neglected, and they could be using the stuff that is being half-assed if it's better.
And I don't believe it has to do with the market. I've worked at a company that was run by pms doing stupid shit. It was dressed up as what the business needed, but it was sheer incompetence. Better people in exactly the same situation would have produced better results by doing different stuff. It's just a culture, not market pressure.
Not directing this at you personally. But I've heard a lot of mediocre engineers whine and complain about PMs, MBAs, C-suite, etc. The best engineers I don't hear complaining much at all. Just a thought.
And sorry but I don't agree that launching AI products in 2026 is not related to the market. I think that's the whole basis for the decision.
What decentralized solution ever existed for preventing DDoS attacks while allowing a spike of traffic when, say, your blog post gets a highly upvoted HN submission? I am not really convinced this is a problem that can be solved without centralization. It'd be like trying to decentralize airports or communications cables.
> What decentralized solution ever existed for preventing DDoS attacks while allowing a spike of traffic when, say, your blog post gets a highly upvoted HN submission?
I view a lot of this as downstream from sort of the IaaS version of the "DRM problem" in cryptography.
In the DRM problem you want to sell someone a Blu-Ray with a movie they can play, but also not allow them to copy the movie. So they get the data but can't have the data.
In the IaaS problem you want to sell someone a piece of server(s) in a datacenter they can play with, but also not allow them to just directly use the hardware (because then they could have open standards and portability). So the product teams are required to work backwards from the necessity of wrapping compute in a thing you can sell as a product.
This also explains nonsense like "durable objects", which may have some purpose but become the weekly podcast fad after getting hyped by cloud providers trying to find new ways to sell compute without selling compute.
I remember being so excited about Cloudflare's releases that I'd check their blog every couple of weeks for what new thing they were cooking up. This was before I actually had to use them to serve production clients.
When it came time to launch (2023?), the initial setup was using DNS/Cache, Workers, Workers KV, R2, D1, Durable Objects, Access, and Queues.
My first hint was that the Typescript library to access their API was simply just wrong. API requests through the library would fail, complaining about missing fields or invalid types, even though the types said my construction was correct, and I received dismissive replies when raising it in their Discord.
Then there were the D1 issues with random requests failing.
Then there were the Durable Objects issues with syncing clients in our collaborative editor.
Then there were the KV and (by extension) Access outages.
Eventually it made sense to switch it all over to AWS. Today, I trust Cloudflare for DNS, Cache, DDoS protection, and not much else.
The "AI psychosis" that may or may not have infected Cloudflare and caused this reminds me of Github's, except Cloudflare has a much much bigger moat.
The problem is, beside their size, they have not moat to compete in AI space. Their data centers are spread across the world in other companys DCs (btw do they own any DC actually from top to bottom?).
Side question: does anyone have a moat in the AI industry? AI vendors for sure do not. Hyperscalers don’t seem to have one. Datacenter companies are in an industry that is more difficult to enter but don’t have a moat per se. Same for manufacturers of HBM and other hardware. NVIDIA is maybe the only player with an actual moat thanks to CUDA & co
Actually, not DC builders themselves, but companies that manufacture fairly specific parts used by DCs, like the massive gas turbines they’ve been using. I’m not familiar with that part of the industry but would assume that has to be a business with a pretty big moat
I don't know where this person got the idea that a company "run by engineers" would result in good products. Engineers don't always care about the end result. I've seen engineers completely compromise the utility and experience of the product to make their own job easier or more fun. If it "sounds logical", they assume it's good and don't ask more questions about how it will impact users.
Would you hire a mechanical engineer to run a car company? The mechanical engineer cares if the transmission is highly efficient; they don't care if the seats are comfortable, or if the car can fit standard wheels/tires. Those are the things the car's user cares about. They expect the transmission to be efficient, but they equally expect it to be comfortable and compatible.
"Infrastructure" isn't a raw mechanical component. It's a product with an entire "life" outside the technical. How it's controlled by a user, its responsiveness and intuitiveness, how they (and 3rd parties) interface with it, its operational and failure modes, its outputs and inputs... all of that's separate from the internal workings.
It's the difference between a car having a door, and having a door that fits perfectly, opens with ease, and closes with no effort, gaps or seams. A ton of extra work is required to make that happen. Making the door is easy; making it fit well is much harder.
Putting a nerd in charge will not fix the focus on the end result. You need to put people in charge who are obsessed with the customer's experience. Say what you will about Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, they at least got that right.
A good point made in the post (that's not really specific to CF) is the problem with multiplying features. It's interesting that most of the extremely-hot-on-AI companies and leaders I know are hyped about 100x product dev, etc and want to throw tons of new assorted features out. This is not a good thing!
I've been at companies with lots of staffing and velocity (pre-AI), and it is a huge foot-gun to think pumping out features is automatically a good thing. Most paying customers do not want this from SaaS type companies.
Smaller companies especially should calm down and do one thing well, and unfortunately AI dev does not encourage that.
For an article that claims to know Cloudflare, I don't think he does.
Cloudflare build from the bottom up. First the SDN ( Software Defined Network), then the products on top. The first one was logical: CDN + DDOS.
All the rest continued to build on top of the SDN - Workers, D1, ... But once they have the full stack ( which happened arround D1), it was time to let others build on top of Cloudflare.
That's the current stage ( Cloud 2.0), that was always the goal. It's even in their ticker ( NET ).
In practise, AI could be a godsend. A total new foundation for software where the Cloudflare stack is a perfect product fit( disposable compute, where others will protect their compute with long running compute contracts). I can't blame them to try to seize the opportunity.
Tbh. I feels like the author hasn't actually adjusted to how Cloudflare is building it's cloud ( eg. how powerfull Durable Objects is).
PS. A big outage is a long time ago... ( we use them, I remember the issues those days and the post mortem, a lot became more stable as far as I noticed).
thank you, I actually only used it to find the specific sources that I linked at the bototm (through Google Search AI: i.e. "what was the URL of the postmortem for that useEffect bug")
They own a huge chunk of the internet now - with many, many companies having deeply integrated CF into their own stuff.
Switching costs are so high, from a business standpoint, investing in technical excellence would be wasted money.
They're just a corp like everyone else. Gravity also applies to them.
__
Don't take this as "they're right to do so".
Take this as
"You should never have started integrating their products this deeply. This was inevitable and obvious."
Using CF always was trading short-term wins for long-term losses. We're now entering said long-term.
The fact is that every major company is AI accelerating their development, and soon, it will just be every company.
We're already past the point of getting our hackles raised when we suspect something is AI written. Everything is or soon will be AI written.
So I don't think it's that useful to blame bad product design on AI.
Bad product design is just bad product design.
Bad writing is just bad writing.
Bad graphic design is just bad graphic design.
The industry needs to get over this hump of pretending we're not all going to adopt AI for every imaginable thing. The cat's out of the bag, for better or for worse.
Only part of the article I disagree with a bit. I'm willing to bet most infrastructure PM's at CF are technical people with engineering backgrounds.
I think what's more likely the culprit is the desperation to claim ground. They (and many others) want to rush out an answer to all of AI's new challenges out of fear of being beaten to the punch.
It usually leads to a complex, almost incoherent product suite.
Well, let's not normalize bad product design. Worse, let's not normalize pushing out broken projects that never get maintained. It's noise and breaks trust. I'd say the maintenance part is especially bad now, I hold very little trust that people will maintain the projects they share.
I've been fighting against the AI detractors for quite a while now but they refuse to see the light. The reason you're seeing AI everywhere is simply because LLM augmented workflows give you _obscene_ efficiency boosts. You need 500 pages of docs updated? Done. You need a thousand edge case tests written? Done. You need red team threat assessments plus adversarial attack writeups? Done. You need to semantically refactor X lines of code or hook up forty different API endpoints? Done. All practically done in an instant (well thirty or so minutes depending on the model). I've been following certain open source projects (won't name them due to brigading and for privacy reasons) that are 100% LLM generated. Meaning full self-healing infrastructure, automated tests, agents spawning off of agents... They're making _literally_ (and this is not hyperbole) 100 to 200k LoC changes _per week_ with a team of like one to two people. If you look at Bun, which at this point is essentially the poster child for a pure LLM developed project, and take a peep at their Github insights, you'll see this
"Excluding merges, 49 authors have pushed 243 commits to main and 6320 commits to all branches. On main, 1551 files have changed and there have been 165,176 additions and 35,130 deletions". This kind of code velocity is _literally impossible to recreate by humans alone_. Straight impossible. Which is why over time every company that wants to stay remotely competitive will have to switch to it.
Code velocity doesn't matter if you're shipping garbage. Shit fired from a cannon is still shit, even it's kind of cool that you built a shit-cannon.
The reason that "AI-detractors won't see the light" is that some people care about the quality of their work, AND ACTUALLY LIKE SOLVING PROBLEMS.
just because something makes a lot of money doesn't mean it's worth doing; there's this particular brainworm infecting AI enthusiasts that currently profitable == valuable. Tiktok is a profitable company, that doesn't mean it provides a service that is inherently valuable to humanity.
Who will read your 500 pages of AI docs? Or check your thousand edge case tests? Who will check the agent spawned off an agent? (That part reads like satire, honestly)
The reason people are AI detractors isn't because they don't believe you can spit out massive amounts of slop. It's because they question the value of it and whether it was worth the immense cost to our planet, ecosystem and society.
> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better
There wasn't. Cloudflare is a cancer grown too big. And it was always positioned to become one, the middleman between users and the Internet.
It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries?
>It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries?
If it's painful, that's not because of cloudflare. You can get past turnstile challenges using tor browser in a VM. You still might be blocked because of policies set by site owners, but that can hardly be blamed on cloudflare.
Genuine good faith question, what would you recommend the solution or alternative to be? How could we be able to get the benefits Cloudflare provides, without the inherent drawbacks?
The general arguments here are that CDNs have replaced tier1 ISPs as the predominant force on the Internet. Geoff Huston has written about this over the last ~10 years[0][1].
So the question as to alternatives is void - the problem is CDNs MitM'ing yur datas across multiple domains, and the loss of the nostalgia (or whatever) for the tier1 ISPs (who were all horrible in their own ways).
I don't particularly subscribe to the harms Geoff purports, but I cannot fault his analysis of the situation. If you haven't read it before, it is worth the read.
If you want a free and open Internet, then you don't want someone else's TLS proxy between every consumer and every producer. This ignores the problems of DDoS, scaling, etc. Buuutttttt.... 99% of websites don't have those problems, so why are you building a solution which trades decentralization for it?
Anyhow, sounds like you're into all the wonderful things Cloudflare (and every other CDN) provides. Great. That's fine, just don't be angry when the free and open Internet promised to all of us in the 1990s requires 3rd party gate keepers. And no, there aren't solutions to all the problems.
0: https://blog.apnic.net/2016/10/28/the-death-of-transit/ 1: https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/internet-report-evolution-...
Being signed into Google doesn't really figure into Cloudflare's systems at all, haven't for years. They replaced ReCaptcha ages ago.
> What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries?
I would take it off of my site
>> made the internet better
One of the measures of "making The Internet" could be looking at RFC contributions:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/search/?q=cloudflare
It could be but proposing a standard and getting it adopted by everyone else is its own monopolistic behavior. Everyone here shits the bed when google tries to do it for ad measurement and decloaking
Is Anubis kinder to non-standard tools?
It works off PoW, so all you need is a vaguely working js/wasm runtime. It won't fail you if it detects you as spoofing user agent, or are running a "weird" browser like servo on freebsd (or whatever). All of this is "good" for being non-discriminatory, but it also means it's pretty easy for baddies to implement hardware accelerated solvers that can solve challenges orders of magnitude faster than any user can, and at a fraction of resources required (because they don't need a full browser).
I don't have Chrome or even any Chrome-like browsers installed, but never have a problem.
Hard disagree. Sure their docs are bad, and it's sometimes buggy. But to me cloudflare is actually innovating and trying to offer "new" infrastructure. Durable objects and workers are super cool. R2 has free egress, isn't it insane that they could pull that off?
If what you want is a VM to run postgres then there are other offerings that would be much better.
Not saying they aren't evil though, they probably are, but the infra stuff is cool.
I disagree with your disagreement. I wrote the post and I am not blaming the innovation. I am blaming the chaos of innovation. Everything feels DISJOINTED.
The innovation is useful, the delivery of the innovation is the pitfall here.
They have cool tech but they can't do product, like most of big tech.
Have you tried wrangler? holy
Hire enough product owners and that's what happens.
That's why they need to buy startups every once and then, to bring some good bacteria in their messed up corporate gut.
What’s missed from the post is that Cloudflare for many years now has felt that they are a “Cloud 2.0” company.
And AWS/GCP/etc are “Cloud 1.0”.
They believe that AI Agent will fundamentally change the internet, and it’s hard to fault them for seeing it that way when their own stats shows that bot/agents account for the majority of Internet traffic.
As such, going all in on AI fits into their thesis of being “Cloud 2.0”.
I think like with most large companies that still ship new stuff:
it gets a bit more complex for customers to figure out what the good nuggets are and what to ignore for now
same @ google, aws and so on
(I usually rely on opinions of people i trust to find the 'javascript — the good parts' version of large offerings)
the other extreme would be not to try and ship new stuff which is also risky
difficult to find a balance and probably a good idea to over-index on momentum and new stuff
while investing enough in hardening and improving the stuff that sticks
I also noticed the ui/ux of cloudflare got way better in the last weeks.
That's a good sign.
Usually ui/ux in large companies gets worse not better!
Cloudflare failed pre-AI with Cloudbleed, which could have been alright except for how they initially handled it. In addition, a few checks & balances have retired or stepped back so there's nothing stopping AI amplification of that company culture.
They may succeed or not, but right now it's hard to stomach as a former fan. I see where a blog post like this could be coming from.
I have to say: Yes, there is a lot of velocity from Cloudflare pushing out AI-adjacent features as of late.
But also: What they've doing with Workers et al. has made them a platform for fully-fledged apps and deployments. I personally love the ecosystem and use it for all of my projects now. It's like the perfect blend of ease-of-use and DX of Heroku, and breadth of services of AWS / GCP. Well, maybe not quite AWS or GCP, but that's kind of the point -- they've created an opinionated system of "objects" that are all highly extensible to the point where in my opinion you can pretty much deploy anything you want on it.
It took me a bit of time to learn the "Cloudflare way" of doing things, but once I started making on it I saw just how flexible (and low cost!) everything is.
Great read. Exact pinpointing of my feelings about CF lately.
It sounds like a blog post in support of a slowdown for product releases. But the reality is there are multiple companies trying to capture the attention of the same market.
Maybe 2 years ago it would’ve been acceptable to release the product internally, slowly add features, dogfood it, then open to public a year later. But now someone else will release the same product within a month, get sticky customers, and most likely won’t switch.
It’s much easier and faster to release features, so once anyone sees a competition gaining some attention, they just copy the same feature. Which, i think, is fair.
It’s easy to blame the org, but the market is extremely competitive right now. Kind of race to the bottom, except the hardware parts, which have different constraints right now.
Hi, I wrote the post, I think blaming the org for releasing things that aren't engineered/created with "love" (including docs, examples, long-term planning and a roadmap of improvement that will follow-on), and suitable for production, without labeling them as beta, is in fact detrimental to the status of a company's image.
AWS/GCP/Azure are full of abandonware. I’m more familiar with the AWS-side of things, and most of them were/are built on top of existing core services. AWS’s/GCP’s image is fine. I’d say as long as CF’s core (CDN/DDoS mitigation/etc.) is stable, they should experiment.
To put it this way, it took GH almost a year to release Stacked PRs to public. And it’s already being questioned if it’ll stand the test of time. Again, insanely competitive market, as everyone wants to sell shovels.
So where do you stand on AWS that may release more than 25 new services a year?
> Examples? Ok -> Let us look at data storage.
> They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive to speed up external Postgres or MySQL.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see this as confusing:
- D1 is SQLite on cloud, their go-to relational database
- Durable object is the cousin of durable execution (via actor model instead of saga)
- KV is for caching like Redis (sub-ms read latency)
- R2 is S3, R2 SQL is Iceberg + Athena (for OLAP queries)
- Queue is SQS
- Hyperdrive is bridge to allow CF worker to use native Postgres/MySQL driver (since v8 isolate cannot maintain persistent connection)
I've built some stuff on top of CF, and the data ecosystem is actually useful.
This is definitely as opinionated as an opinion piece can go. Worth mentioning I don't use CF anywhere or care about it... but my employer does.
I can really only remember one catastrophic outage. It involved some part of CF that had no redundancy, and the incident was followed by a pretty whiny blog about a data center.
That's pretty much it. There were other minor outages but I'm not aware that it affected business.
Despite the disclaimer I think the author should explain precisely how "AI product mindset" or whatever is actually translating to bad outcomes.
Just skimmed the article, but the CF your employer used was probably around a lot longer than AI? There's parts of it that can bring everything down. Then there's parts of it that will bring down just what your team(s) put in a load of hard work to build on top of it.
The blog implies that CF's core business is suffering because of added investment in what the author describes as AI. See their useEffect bug as an example.
EDIT: To be clear, my employer still uses CF and I don't see any evidence that it's gotten worse.
Cloudflare's UI is basically the web equivalent of the git CLI.
Powerful, but the densest collection of UI anti-patterns known to man.
Their "designers" obviously walked up hill both ways in the snow to school every day while being eaten by a walrus and feel anyone who doesn't enjoy a suitably opaque navigation scheme isn't worth acknowledging.
> Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great
They want to eat at the AI table, given that they are not producing models or GPUs and not building datacentres, they try with the product. But we are still in the early stage so it's not clear what will work and what not, so they have to try as much as possible.
Hey everyone, author here, I am very frustrated with the state of Cloudflare and I posted this blog the other day on my blog and here on HN (but generated no discussion), thanks for re-posting it, I am gonna start reading the comments and start replying
I'm also curious about the question posted at the end: where did the infrastructure nerds go?
Likely to the AI labs and hyperscalers? Given the insane growth and level of expenditure I assume it’s a fun place where to work (assuming you’re ok contributing actively to the AI industry)
> First of all tons of more outages than ever, remember that React useEffect fkup [0]? Complete insane that this would happen at an infra company that runs a third or so of the web.
Bugs happen all the time. They roughly increase with scale, not decrease. There’s an argument to be made about better testing, but this specific bug seems like a perfect one to slip through: multiple services, hard to spot at code review, involves JS/frontend, invisible at low traffic (test/UT envs).
So IMO it’s not completely insane. Is the implication that Cloudflare should have no bugs whatsoever?
Bugs happen all the time yes, outages don't.
If outages are increasing with scale you get 1 or maybe 2 free passes.
After that you either have in-ept Engineering or just in-ept leadership.
I used to be all in on CF a while ago, now I am moving off them almost entirely.
Same issue with GitHub, I can understand if you can't build for the scale when you couldn't predict it but if after over 12-18 months things don't seem to be improving what are you even doing?
I honestly think all of these companies are deluded if they think people will stick around with all these weekly outage events.
I have a homelab server I have had 2 outages in 1 year because my shitty ISP went down. Still at 99.9% uptime, I have done nothing special. I now have backup internet as well.
Is it big? Nope but it doesn't need to be cf scale.
And scale is the reason to use these services why would I use cloudflare if a homelab would have been enough?
If they aren't designing and scaling their systems to handle this scale they might as well close shop, someone else might do it better.
As a infra/dev person who does his own thing on the side, I might be the most impacted by these outages, so I might be coming off as harsh. But they cost me both time/money and headache in extra development work.
Imagine prod deploys are down for 2 days why? Because GitHub actions keep failing...
Oh serving new OTA updates broke? Why? dig into the code.. go oncall with users instead of doing work, realize it's a CF outage and the writes failed. (Feel the tears streaming down your face).
If I have to waste dev time, with AI and me together we could self host it with higher reliability with significantly cheaper costs at this point even at fairly decent scale.
I think any infra company that has more than 1 outage a year is already not worth investing in.
But more than 3 and you might be better off self hosting, even in this ram apocalypse.
If all people in SF are this unserious about reliability (which hasn't been my experience but HN seems especially open to break the prod if you have to)
Then well software companies really do deserve to be replaced by AI.
To put it bluntly: that is complete nonsense.
AWS has had more than 1 outage a year - is it not worth investing in? Are they not serious?
Outages are just a specific kind of bug, often surfaced by the interactions of several discrete bugs.
Saying “you’re not serious if you have more than 1 bug a year” is silly.
This might be rude but this is the reason we have shitty software everywhere. The "there can always be a bug, get over it mindset" is the reason software sucks, everything needs a dozen patches to even work and no one can have any peace in this business.
I honestly don't even want to debate this because I see no point, as honestly the side that would have said outages shouldn't happen is dead buried and out of a job at this point.
But,
> Saying “you’re not serious if you have more than 1 bug a year” is silly.
> Outages are just a specific kind of bug, often surfaced by the interactions of several discrete bugs.
Several bugs or 1 bug? you decide and tell me, when you have made up your mind.
Outages happen as a result of the system's design being shoddy in the first place, and an attitude where bugs shipped are acceptable because it's only a single component, rest of the system shouldn't fail.
It won't go down was the entire thing with microservices and "the cloud" I could link some blogs and brochures if you want me to.
I am honestly over the moon with these conversations on HN, really proves the point why AI is rightly replacing engineers in software, because there wasn't any engineering to begin with.
Imagine if a civil engineer said bridges fall it's fine for a few bridges to fall because bugs happen, and honestly bridge falling is just a kind of bug where several discrete bugs happened at once.
I am certain there is some room to argue about it, but what is clear is that if it was happening every single month you would have stopping using bridges unless absolutely necessary.
I am not sure if there is ever a reply for this honestly, I honestly don't even blame the people just the culture at this point. If that's what software is to some, "something that can fail at any time" and cloud's selling point is just fewer "switches to flip" I am sure I can't change that.
But I won't be deluded into thinking that software outages are just an everyday "bug" and it's fine to have several outages a year, it is the normal mode of operation in-fact no harm done.
> Outages happen as a result of the system's design being shoddy in the first place, and an attitude where bugs shipped are acceptable because it's only a single component, rest of the system shouldn't fail.
This is correct for some classes of failure but not others. If your authorization system goes down, should you just let any request pass? No.
You also need to fail correctly. If we extend the civil engineering analogy, then that would mean fail safely.
Two trains derailed in the UK last week. Should we all abandon trains? No? Why do plane crashes happen? That’s the most safety conscious area for software and hardware.
Because failures happen. Everyone expects them. Bridges don’t last forever, they know they will fail after a specific time frame and so they design around that. Planes have triplicate systems everywhere. And yet, despite all this, failures still happen.
And the fact they know that bridges have specific failure modes and lifespans is the result of a long, long history of bridges failing.
I know CF has a good reputation, but at the same time when I first approached their website I have to agree with the poster, it’s just incoherent.
I don’t understand the impulse to whine and complain about the aesthetics of a big company.
> a little more cringey and clique
Why on earth do I care if someone thinks Cloudflare is cringe? What is interesting about that? They are following the market like everyone else.
> Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great…They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive to speed up external Postgres or MySQL.
What does this have to do with AI psychosis? I thought that was the thesis of this article? As I said, it’s just directionless complaining.
i read the article as caring about the values, principles, and goals of the human beings driving it.
if you are looking exclusively at compiled bits and bytes and/or quarterly statements then I agree, human/societal judgment seems irrelevant.
What values and principles are supposed to be preventing cloudflare, the internet and technology company, from exploring hot new internet markets and technologies?
the constant "fights" with Vercel instead of delivering shareholder value by refining the product
I'm not even sure if I would know who Vercel is if I were at Cloudflare. The scale between the two is staggeringly different.
That makes it worse, not better.
Because it affects people personally? They are using the stuff that's being neglected, and they could be using the stuff that is being half-assed if it's better.
And I don't believe it has to do with the market. I've worked at a company that was run by pms doing stupid shit. It was dressed up as what the business needed, but it was sheer incompetence. Better people in exactly the same situation would have produced better results by doing different stuff. It's just a culture, not market pressure.
Not directing this at you personally. But I've heard a lot of mediocre engineers whine and complain about PMs, MBAs, C-suite, etc. The best engineers I don't hear complaining much at all. Just a thought.
And sorry but I don't agree that launching AI products in 2026 is not related to the market. I think that's the whole basis for the decision.
I didn't say that AI products aren't related to the market. The problem is not that they're AI it's that they're badly done.
Do you think people whose circumstances are favorable to them are more likely to succeed and less likely to complain?
> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better
This is the kind of naive thinking that enabled what's going on today. Sadly, the decentralized Internet is now destroyed and will never exist again.
Yeah but you can't blame 1 company for destroying the whole thing
What decentralized solution ever existed for preventing DDoS attacks while allowing a spike of traffic when, say, your blog post gets a highly upvoted HN submission? I am not really convinced this is a problem that can be solved without centralization. It'd be like trying to decentralize airports or communications cables.
> What decentralized solution ever existed for preventing DDoS attacks while allowing a spike of traffic when, say, your blog post gets a highly upvoted HN submission?
BGP FlowSpec
https://github.com/exa-networks/exabgp/wiki/FlowSpec-Overvie...
I view a lot of this as downstream from sort of the IaaS version of the "DRM problem" in cryptography.
In the DRM problem you want to sell someone a Blu-Ray with a movie they can play, but also not allow them to copy the movie. So they get the data but can't have the data.
In the IaaS problem you want to sell someone a piece of server(s) in a datacenter they can play with, but also not allow them to just directly use the hardware (because then they could have open standards and portability). So the product teams are required to work backwards from the necessity of wrapping compute in a thing you can sell as a product.
This also explains nonsense like "durable objects", which may have some purpose but become the weekly podcast fad after getting hyped by cloud providers trying to find new ways to sell compute without selling compute.
I remember being so excited about Cloudflare's releases that I'd check their blog every couple of weeks for what new thing they were cooking up. This was before I actually had to use them to serve production clients.
When it came time to launch (2023?), the initial setup was using DNS/Cache, Workers, Workers KV, R2, D1, Durable Objects, Access, and Queues.
My first hint was that the Typescript library to access their API was simply just wrong. API requests through the library would fail, complaining about missing fields or invalid types, even though the types said my construction was correct, and I received dismissive replies when raising it in their Discord.
Then there were the D1 issues with random requests failing.
Then there were the Durable Objects issues with syncing clients in our collaborative editor.
Then there were the KV and (by extension) Access outages.
Eventually it made sense to switch it all over to AWS. Today, I trust Cloudflare for DNS, Cache, DDoS protection, and not much else.
The "AI psychosis" that may or may not have infected Cloudflare and caused this reminds me of Github's, except Cloudflare has a much much bigger moat.
The problem is, beside their size, they have not moat to compete in AI space. Their data centers are spread across the world in other companys DCs (btw do they own any DC actually from top to bottom?).
Side question: does anyone have a moat in the AI industry? AI vendors for sure do not. Hyperscalers don’t seem to have one. Datacenter companies are in an industry that is more difficult to enter but don’t have a moat per se. Same for manufacturers of HBM and other hardware. NVIDIA is maybe the only player with an actual moat thanks to CUDA & co
Companies specialized in building DCs and AI labs specialized in niche models?
Actually, not DC builders themselves, but companies that manufacture fairly specific parts used by DCs, like the massive gas turbines they’ve been using. I’m not familiar with that part of the industry but would assume that has to be a business with a pretty big moat
I don't know where this person got the idea that a company "run by engineers" would result in good products. Engineers don't always care about the end result. I've seen engineers completely compromise the utility and experience of the product to make their own job easier or more fun. If it "sounds logical", they assume it's good and don't ask more questions about how it will impact users.
Would you hire a mechanical engineer to run a car company? The mechanical engineer cares if the transmission is highly efficient; they don't care if the seats are comfortable, or if the car can fit standard wheels/tires. Those are the things the car's user cares about. They expect the transmission to be efficient, but they equally expect it to be comfortable and compatible.
"Infrastructure" isn't a raw mechanical component. It's a product with an entire "life" outside the technical. How it's controlled by a user, its responsiveness and intuitiveness, how they (and 3rd parties) interface with it, its operational and failure modes, its outputs and inputs... all of that's separate from the internal workings.
It's the difference between a car having a door, and having a door that fits perfectly, opens with ease, and closes with no effort, gaps or seams. A ton of extra work is required to make that happen. Making the door is easy; making it fit well is much harder.
Putting a nerd in charge will not fix the focus on the end result. You need to put people in charge who are obsessed with the customer's experience. Say what you will about Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, they at least got that right.
take astral, planetscale.... Pi even - so many good orgs where the product is the result of engineering passion
Never heard of any of those. Pi the AI harness, sure.
Not sure those are good examples if people can't relate to them.
Note: Astral was acquired by OpenAI, so I'd assume they will no longer meet your criteria soon.
ok those are probably my examples from my memory, feel free to replace those names with the ones you love the most.
A good point made in the post (that's not really specific to CF) is the problem with multiplying features. It's interesting that most of the extremely-hot-on-AI companies and leaders I know are hyped about 100x product dev, etc and want to throw tons of new assorted features out. This is not a good thing!
I've been at companies with lots of staffing and velocity (pre-AI), and it is a huge foot-gun to think pumping out features is automatically a good thing. Most paying customers do not want this from SaaS type companies.
Smaller companies especially should calm down and do one thing well, and unfortunately AI dev does not encourage that.
> Smaller companies especially should calm down and do one thing well
They're going to get absolutely steamrolled unless it is a high risk critical industry.
Maybe, but pretending to be Atlassian or whomever doesn't help either afaics
For an article that claims to know Cloudflare, I don't think he does.
Cloudflare build from the bottom up. First the SDN ( Software Defined Network), then the products on top. The first one was logical: CDN + DDOS.
All the rest continued to build on top of the SDN - Workers, D1, ... But once they have the full stack ( which happened arround D1), it was time to let others build on top of Cloudflare.
That's the current stage ( Cloud 2.0), that was always the goal. It's even in their ticker ( NET ).
In practise, AI could be a godsend. A total new foundation for software where the Cloudflare stack is a perfect product fit( disposable compute, where others will protect their compute with long running compute contracts). I can't blame them to try to seize the opportunity.
Tbh. I feels like the author hasn't actually adjusted to how Cloudflare is building it's cloud ( eg. how powerfull Durable Objects is).
PS. A big outage is a long time ago... ( we use them, I remember the issues those days and the post mortem, a lot became more stable as far as I noticed).
on the bright side, this rant doesn't sound ai generated.
thank you, I actually only used it to find the specific sources that I linked at the bototm (through Google Search AI: i.e. "what was the URL of the postmortem for that useEffect bug")
An organic rant, for some locally-produced even.
Accurate
Why would they do anything else?
They own a huge chunk of the internet now - with many, many companies having deeply integrated CF into their own stuff.
Switching costs are so high, from a business standpoint, investing in technical excellence would be wasted money. They're just a corp like everyone else. Gravity also applies to them.
__
Don't take this as "they're right to do so". Take this as "You should never have started integrating their products this deeply. This was inevitable and obvious."
Using CF always was trading short-term wins for long-term losses. We're now entering said long-term.
The fact is that every major company is AI accelerating their development, and soon, it will just be every company.
We're already past the point of getting our hackles raised when we suspect something is AI written. Everything is or soon will be AI written.
So I don't think it's that useful to blame bad product design on AI.
Bad product design is just bad product design. Bad writing is just bad writing. Bad graphic design is just bad graphic design.
The industry needs to get over this hump of pretending we're not all going to adopt AI for every imaginable thing. The cat's out of the bag, for better or for worse.
It's not just the AI. The post mentions poor choices because of a product management mindset instead of engineers leading the PMs.
Only part of the article I disagree with a bit. I'm willing to bet most infrastructure PM's at CF are technical people with engineering backgrounds.
I think what's more likely the culprit is the desperation to claim ground. They (and many others) want to rush out an answer to all of AI's new challenges out of fear of being beaten to the punch.
It usually leads to a complex, almost incoherent product suite.
Well, let's not normalize bad product design. Worse, let's not normalize pushing out broken projects that never get maintained. It's noise and breaks trust. I'd say the maintenance part is especially bad now, I hold very little trust that people will maintain the projects they share.
I think that's 33% of my rant too! Pushing out features and forgetting about them 1 week later.
I've been fighting against the AI detractors for quite a while now but they refuse to see the light. The reason you're seeing AI everywhere is simply because LLM augmented workflows give you _obscene_ efficiency boosts. You need 500 pages of docs updated? Done. You need a thousand edge case tests written? Done. You need red team threat assessments plus adversarial attack writeups? Done. You need to semantically refactor X lines of code or hook up forty different API endpoints? Done. All practically done in an instant (well thirty or so minutes depending on the model). I've been following certain open source projects (won't name them due to brigading and for privacy reasons) that are 100% LLM generated. Meaning full self-healing infrastructure, automated tests, agents spawning off of agents... They're making _literally_ (and this is not hyperbole) 100 to 200k LoC changes _per week_ with a team of like one to two people. If you look at Bun, which at this point is essentially the poster child for a pure LLM developed project, and take a peep at their Github insights, you'll see this
"Excluding merges, 49 authors have pushed 243 commits to main and 6320 commits to all branches. On main, 1551 files have changed and there have been 165,176 additions and 35,130 deletions". This kind of code velocity is _literally impossible to recreate by humans alone_. Straight impossible. Which is why over time every company that wants to stay remotely competitive will have to switch to it.
Code velocity doesn't matter if you're shipping garbage. Shit fired from a cannon is still shit, even it's kind of cool that you built a shit-cannon.
The reason that "AI-detractors won't see the light" is that some people care about the quality of their work, AND ACTUALLY LIKE SOLVING PROBLEMS.
just because something makes a lot of money doesn't mean it's worth doing; there's this particular brainworm infecting AI enthusiasts that currently profitable == valuable. Tiktok is a profitable company, that doesn't mean it provides a service that is inherently valuable to humanity.
Who will read your 500 pages of AI docs? Or check your thousand edge case tests? Who will check the agent spawned off an agent? (That part reads like satire, honestly)
The reason people are AI detractors isn't because they don't believe you can spit out massive amounts of slop. It's because they question the value of it and whether it was worth the immense cost to our planet, ecosystem and society.
I believe protest and criticism are corrective processes, and we shouldn’t give up.