I want to like CloudFlare over DO/AWS. I like their DevX focus too -- I could see issues if devs can't get into the abstractions though.
Any red flags folks would stake regarding CF? I know they are widely used but not sure where the gotchas are.
One that bit me was https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-for-platforms/c... - we found an alternative solution that didn't require upgrading to their enterprise plan (yet), but it was a pretty compelling reason to upgrade and if I was doing it again I'd probably choose upgrading over implementing our solution. On balance I'm not sure we actually saved money in the end, considering opportunity cost
For headless browsers, the latency benefits of “container anywhere” seems high. For things like AI inference, running on the edge seems way less beneficial than running on the cheapest location possible which would be larger regional data centers.
The operational excellence required to have every successful Internet company manage deployments to a dozen regions just isn’t there. Most of us struggle with three, my last gig tried to do two, which isn’t economical because you always try to handle one region going dark which means you need at least 200% capacity, where 3 data centers only need 150 + ??%, and 4 need 133 + ??%. It has all of the consistency problems of n > 1 and few if any of the advantages.
We need more help from the CDNs of the world to run compute heavy operations at the edge. And if they choose to send them 10-20ms away to a beefier data center I think that’s probably fine. Just don’t make us have to have the sort of operational discipline that requires.
Good point about at the very least not exposing placement to customers. That is a definite win.
Such as? See: https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/compliance-resources/