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Comment by zac23or | Hacker News Reader

It's no surprise that Cloudflare is having a service issue again.

I use Cloudflare at work. Cloudflare has many bugs, and some technical decisions are absurd, such as the worker's cache.delete method, which only clears the cache contents in the data center where the Worker was invoked!!! https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/cache...

In my experience, Cloudflare support is not helpful at all, trying to pass the problem onto the user, like "Just avoid holding it in that way. ".

At work, I needed to use Cloudflare. The next job I get, I'll put a limit on my responsibilities: I don't work with Cloudflare.

I will never use Cloudflare at home and I don't recommend it to anyone.

Next week: A new post about how Cloudflare saved the web from a massive DDOS attack.

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> some technical decisions are absurd, such as the worker's cache.delete method, which only clears the cache contents in the data center where the Worker was invoked!!!

The Cache API is a standard taken from browsers. In the browser, cache.delete obviously only deletes that browser's cache, not all other browsers in the world. You could certainly argue that a global purge would be more useful in Workers, but it would be inconsistent with the standard API behavior, and also would be extraordinarily expensive. Code designed to use the standard cache API would end up being much more expensive than expected.

With all that said, we (Workers team) do generally feel in retrospect that the Cache API was not a good fit for our platform. We really wanted to follow standards, but this standard in this case is too specific to browsers and as a result does not work well for typical use cases in Cloudflare Workers. We'd like to replace it with something better.

Just wanted to say, I always appreciate your comments and frankness!

>cache.delete obviously only deletes that browser's cache, not all other browsers in the world.

To me, it only makes sense if the put method creates a cache only in the datacenter where the Worker was invoked. Put and delete need to be related, in my opinion.

Now I'm curious: what's the point of clearing the cache contents in the datacenter where the Worker was invoked? I can't think of any use for this method.

My criticisms aren't about functionality per see or developers. I don't doubt the developers' competence, but I feel like there's something wrong with the company culture.

> To me, it only makes sense if the put method creates a cache only in the datacenter where the Worker was invoked. Put and delete need to be related, in my opinion.

That is, in fact, how it works. cache.put() only writes to the local datacenter's cache. If delete() were global, it would be inconsistent with put().

> Now I'm curious: what's the point of clearing the cache contents in the datacenter where the Worker was invoked? I can't think of any use for this method.

Say you read the cache entry but you find, based on its content, that it is no longer valid. You would then want to delete it, to save the cost of reading it again later.

> cache.put() only writes the local datacenter's cache.

Thanks, I didn't know that (I don't remember reading it in the documentation)

Cloudflare is definitely not perfect (and when they make a change that breaks the existing API contract it always makes for several miserable days for me), but on the whole Cloudflare is pretty reliable.

That said, I don't use workers and don't plan to. I personally try to stay away from non cross-platform stuff because I've been burned too heavily with vendor/platform lock-in in the past.

> and when they make a change that breaks the existing API contract it always makes for several miserable days for me

If we changed an API in Workers in a way that broke any Worker in production, we consider that an incident and we will roll it back ASAP. We really try to avoid this but sometimes it's hard for us to tell. Please feel free to contact us if this happens in the future (e.g. file a support ticket or file a bug on workerd on GitHub or complain in our Discord or email kenton@cloudflare.com).

Thank you! To clarify it's been API contracts in the DNS record setting API that have hit me. I'm going from memory here and it's been a couple years I think so might be a bit rusty, but one example was a slight change in data type acceptance for TTL on a record. It used to take either a string or integer in the JSON but at some point started rejecting integers (or strings, whichever one I was sending at the time stopped being accepted) so the API calls were suddenly failing (to be fair that might not have technically been a violation of the contract, but it was a change in behavior that had been consistent for years and which I would not have expected). Another one was regarding returning zone_id for records where the zone_id stopped getting populated in the returned record. Luckily my code already had the zone_id because it needs that to build the URL path, but it was a rough debugging session and then I had to hack around it by either re-adding the zone ID to the returned record or removing zone ID from my equality check, neither of which were preferred solutions.

If we start using workers though I'll definitely let you know if any API changes!

Hmm, I am not familiar with the DNS API but those certainly sound like changes that I'd argue should not have been made. :/

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