> CF Workers is based on the Service Workers API, which is a W3C standard that has existed in browsers for some time.
> Unfortunately, many competing edge compute and "serverless" products have chosen to invent their own, proprietary APIs, rather than use a standard. My sincere hope is that this will change, and in the future, we'll see a convergence on Service Workers. It fits this use case very well, and it's already a standard.
That's really nice to hear. After the fallout the Github acquisition produced the last days one cannot stress enough how important standardized APIs are for migration operations. I know that vendor lock-ins are profitable business models, but I feel like the damage it does to flexible architectures and data-owning produces more costs in the long run.
> While Cloudflare does use V8, we do not use Node.js
Was this ever an option? Did you consider using other languages besides JavaScript? Like Python or Elixir?
> And in any case, we aim to win by building a better (larger, faster, less-expensive) network, not by trapping people.
Even though I agree with you (as written above) I wonder how Cloudflare aims to do this. To me, it seems like Cloudflare does have way too much websites behind their services. Given that Cloudflare has a history with policing [DS] customers, trust is also an essential feature I'd give top priority. I would therefore argue that decentralization should also be a feature for resilient networks, though it's difficult to implement in your case.
Btw, does Cloudflare have any serious competitors besides CDN providers?
Thanks again for your reply, very interested in your expertise!
[DS] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/