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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Slightly OT but I found the experience of maintaining and deploying workers to be terrible and so monorepo-unfriendly due to wrangler forced usage for deploys (or at least I haven't found better ways) which has implications on how the project gets bundled and deployed.

I wish there was a simple stupid "just drop an artifact with a main.js" file and that's it.

Cloudflare is one of those companies I really want to like, but as a developer I just don't think they care. They want to chase big guys with big contracts that can get the love and support average Joe does not.

They seem to strongly underestimate the traction and money they could get by giving engineers rather than sales and accounts some more love.

And thus we have moved our stack, initially built around Cloudflare, to Azure. It also helps Microsoft throws lots of credits at startups and Cloudflare does not. But DX rather than money has been the biggest reason we moved off CF offerings.

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I have the exactly opposite experience of yours. Cloudflare DX is by far the best among the cloud providers I've tried. Today, it's not that complicated to setup wrangler with credentials to your Cloudflare account in any mayor CI. If you have multiple services in your repo you can have multiple directories with each containing its own wrangler.toml. You can even connect these services with service bindings (beta feature still).

In my mind Cloudflare gets the big picture of DX exactly right. When deploying your service the deployment itself is not stateful, there's only one step to it: 'wrangler deploy'. Compare that to AWS Lambda: 1. build you code, 2. pack into a zip file, 3. make sure the S3 bucket exists, 4. upload the zip to the bucket, 5. deploy lambda, 6. update API gateway... And don't even get me started on Cloudfront - every change takes like 5min to apply.

Every so often I do encounter some rough edges, like service bindings binding to deployed services or workerd binary dynamically linking to some shared libraries so wrangler installed through npm doesn't work on Nixos etc. That said I respect the approach Cloudflare team is taking by focusing on the really important stuff first.

> Compare that to AWS Lambda: 1. build you code, 2. pack into a zip file, 3. make sure the S3 bucket exists, 4. upload the zip to the bucket, 5. deploy lambda, 6. update API gateway... And don't even get me started on Cloudfront - every change takes like 5min to apply.

For AWS are you aware of SAM for CloudFormation[1]? The CDK[2]? You picked the best representation of Cloudflare (via `wrangler.toml`) but the worst representation for AWS of the developer experience. `cdk deploy` is pretty seamless and similar to `wrangler deploy` [3].

1 - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/lat...

2 - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/v2/guide/home.html

3 - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/v2/guide/serverless_example....

The CDK is incredibly Byzantine and assumes you have a lot of in depth knowledge of AWS services.

I can learn Cloudflare workers in a few hours by contrast.

I hate the CDK because it’s a terrible undisciplined undiscoverable interface to their services.

I wish AWS wasn’t everyone’s default cloud choice, it’s DX is horrendous

Perhaps you should redo the calculation.

As soon as azure credits stop, it gets really expensive really fast and migrating off is labor intensive ( been there, done that and I regret going through it).

In comparison with cloudflare, which is relatively cheap.

Ps. Uploading a zip to Cloudflare: https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/get-started/direct-u...

I tried the zip upload once and it was really messy. The MIME types were not set properly (unlike wrangler) and they polluted the CF cache so even after I redeployed with wrangler it was still serving the assets with the wrong MIME types.

I think it was for WebP files but I can’t remember.

interesting - I found CF very interesting and with nice growing tooling (ofc, still a lot of space to grow). But... I have no experience with Azure - I was always struck by businesses like Oracle - which expand into SaaS/PaaS/cloud biz but provide zero tools for devs/"makers".

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