Ask HN: What's Happening at Cloudflare?

[disadvantage]

I seem to be bombarded by multiple Cloudflare posts on Hackernews lately. Is there something else I should know? Is this 'innovation month' at Cloudflare or something? All these were posted in the last few weeks! ↪

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-first-zero-trust-sim/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/workerd-open-source-workers-runtime/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-cloudflare-calls/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/r2-ga/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/adaptive-ddos-protection/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-queues/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/rethinking-internet-of-things-security/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-and-macs-using-new-standard/

[jgrahamc]

GA Week (https://blog.cloudflare.com/welcome-to-ga-week/) followed by Birthday Week (https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-annual-founders-lett...)

[erwinh → jgrahamc]

Smart move to pool these things together to dominate HN etc for a week or so. A release every ~2 months or so feels bite size but combined you got a full feast.

[dang → erwinh]

Companies love to bundle their announcements together like this for some reason, though I wish they wouldn't. We end up downweighting the follow-ups because (a) too much repetition is uninteresting and (b) it leads to off-topic complaints like the OP. Note that (a) and (b) are directly related.

I tell YC startups not to do this, though by the time YC startups get big enough to think corporate thoughts like "let's bundle our announcements together", they usually stop listening to us.

[ren_engineer → erwinh]

the opposite in my opinion, plenty of these are cool things that get overshadowed due to all the other stuff. Better to have a constant drip of stuff that keeps you on people's minds and gives you an excuse to talk about yourself. Plus you can then use new stuff to reference prior releases and products

and you don't get threads like this where people feel like Cloudflare is spamming them

[paulgb → ren_engineer]

Tony Fadell's book, Build, has some interesting discussion of “launch events” and it persuaded me onto the idea that they are a good thing.

Basically, he contrasts the launch culture of Apple (WWDC + a few other events throughout the year) with Google's (basically an uncoordinated shitshow).

[jrumbut → ren_engineer]

When you see the first post you think "you know, I've been meaning to get serious about a CDN for my assets and DDOS protection, I should take a look at Cloudflare."

But since you can run your website without it, it's easy to put that on the back burner. But if you're reminded several times in a couple weeks maybe that pushes you over the threshold to activity.

That said, sometimes when I see a company releasing several updates in a row I get nervous that they are pivoting or going to drown me in new features.

[judge2020 → jrumbut]

For what it's worth, CF remains quite good even if you don't use something like Workers, Zaraz, etc. The only real thing that you should be looking at is replacing Page Rules with the newer systems[0-2], however, afaik there is no official deprecation nor sunset date for Page Rules.

0: https://blog.cloudflare.com/dynamic-redirect-rules/

1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cache-rules/

2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/configuration-rules/

[costcofries → erwinh]

I'm sure that's not their intent. What's notable though is how much innovation they are actually showing, that's rare imho.

[Lammy]

Probably trying to push https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/ out of the news cycle.

[nisegami → Lammy]

I'm pretty sure birthday week is the same time every year, although GA week is new. I guess that part could have been brought up to further drown out the KF drama, but it seems like a stretch to me. Pulling up general availability sounds a lot harder than the demos of birthday week.

Edit: for example, here's their 2019 birthday week post, from Sept 22nd 2019: https://blog.cloudflare.com/birthday-week-2019/

[tenpies → nisegami]

Your birthday does not move on the calendar, but your celebration can certainly be ramped in order to try to overwrite how badly you behaved a few weeks ago.

[Aaronstotle → Lammy]

Outside of the twitter circles, I don't think this would have been remembered by many people within the next week.

[olliecornelia → Lammy]

They could have just waited two weeks and everyone would forget about that.

[Cloudef → Lammy]

They also host extreme korean feminism site womad.life I'm sure there's a lot more not so nice places that they host or offer CDN for. While not taking a stance whether their actions are good or bad, it makes less attractive to rely them for their services if they can simply drop you off from their network. Especially considering they are more or less MITM (if using CDN). If using them it is at least good idea to consider a backup in case there's a conflict.

[klabb3 → Cloudef]

> While not taking a stance whether their actions are good or bad

It took me 10s to find incitement to violence, in both posts and comments. That said, I think it's fair most people aren't afraid of feminist extremists. The Kiwifarms rationale was real world harm (although it's not cleae both whether non-real harm exists and the line between indirect and direct harm). Does this site have a similar problems? There is a difference between threats and credible threats, after all.

To be crystal clear, I'm not endorsing or defending any party.

[Cloudef → klabb3]

There's recorded incidents with both womad and megalia, including child sexual abuse. They are pretty much the main reason all sort of feminism, even non-radical is considered as male hate in south korea.

[pstuart → Cloudef]

What does extreme feminism mean to you? I don't speak or read Korean so the site wasn't clear to me.

[Cloudef → pstuart]

There is global board there, though not as active. People post there in english. You can read more from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womad_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalia

[AussieWog93 → pstuart]

Reading through some of the translated stuff, it seems they refer to men as "dicks" (I think this is a diminutive to imply that men are just disgusting penises, not the English slang for "dick" being an arsehole/cunt) and "parasites" and advocate violence against them for breathing too loudly.

[pstuart → AussieWog93]

Advocating for violence is not good, but I can understand how women can be pissed at the patriarchy.

[mrpotato]

From a cloudflare email I received 2 days ago:

> Cloudflare launched at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on September 27th, 2010. Every year since then, during the last week of September, we celebrate Cloudflare’s birthday by announcing innovative products that further our mission of helping build a better Internet.

[AaronFriel]

It's a comprehensive marketing strategy they have to appear on aggregators like this one, and it seems effective. Product announcements are bundled together into a jam-packed "innovation week" with accompanying blog posts. The weeks are typically announced with a blog post, capped off at the end with another listing the new announcements, and there are multiple blog posts a day about products, blog posts about the blog posts, and so on.

Just this year they've done a GA Week (this week), Cloudflare One Week (June), Platform Week (May), Security Week (March). And at the beginning of the year, they wrote a post detailing all of the week themes of 2021: https://blog.cloudflare.com/2021-innovations-weeks/

[kylehotchkiss]

They seem to find new weeks of feature launches to make every year! I love it. They've given me a nice alternative to AWS/GCP for the types of development projects I work on and it's so developer friendly. Client friendly too when all these things generally amount to better performing sites.

[prions]

Same with Fly.io, SQLite, Hetzner, etc. Hackernews is a pretty effective way to advertise to developers.

[atonse → prions]

Don't know about Hetzner but Fly.io and SQLite (who now seem to sort of be intertwined in making SQLite Cool Again™) just have great content.

[sascha_sl → atonse]

Hetzner/OVH are HN darlings not because of how innovative they are in features, but in pricing.

They tend to show up as submissions mostly when something bad happens (e.g. price increase), but they still show up in comments a lot when people discuss how comically expensive cloud providers are in a direct comparison and how you can be similarly effective running on such pricing-focused hosts, especially if you know how to build the redundancy yourself (or don't need it).

[depr → atonse]

Which is a pretty effective way to advertise to developers.

[janee → prions]

Wish there was a nice HN coffee table book documenting historic trends on here... from first post to current print date. Maybe just a bunch of illustrations of key words and a small foot note accompanying each

[0xbadcafebee → prions]

The marketing strategy for anything remotely developer-oriented is literally just to find those posts where somebody figured out the best times to submit on HN.

[godisdad]

I think it’s called “shipping”

[trog]

It's wayyyyyyyyyy too much stuff. It's amazing that they're shipping so much, including some nice free things. But I have had Cloudflare fatigue for over a year simply from getting their newsletters and following some of their RSS feeds. Every day there's some other hyper-advanced new zero trust networking thing. I simply have no idea what products they have any more, other than that the depth or breadth of their product range is huge.

[CSDude]

They like to announce multiple things at once every 2-3 months. However, my frustration is that although many announcements interest me, most of them are released in waitlist mode (kept like that for many months) and they don't respond you in months because you are not interesting/big enough. Others are either GA announcements, or contact your account manager to try and learn more. Like many games and other products, users beta test/QA for free.

[ChrisArchitect]

Many of them are tagged with Birthday Week, c'mon. Could check their social or homepage to figure this out.

No need to upvote this!!!!

[AtNightWeCode]

It is a marketing strategy. I guess.

Can we have a filter box for the left menu on the site. And maybe a section about what is included in “your” enterprise agreement. Without billing access.

[jumperabg]

I am following their blog RSS feed and there were around 12 posts posted at the same time. Guess they just dumped all of the info with a cronjob?

[Slix]

Does anyone know what it's like to work there? I'm interested.

[jgrahamc → Slix]

I do.

[izacus]

I believe this is called marketing and advertising ^^

[rs_rs_rs_rs_rs]

Thanks for advertising these, I missed them!

[AtlasBarfed]

So Cloudflare is going full cloud provider?

[xwdv → AtlasBarfed]

Yes this has been known for a while.

[swyx → xwdv]

i wrote this piece a while back on how Cloudflare is eating the cloud from "outside in" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903982

[AtlasBarfed → swyx]

It's a natural growth from their market position.

[synthetigram]

Cloudflare is great at blogging about technologies Google pioneered.

[itronitron]

this post would be more credible if you posted the HN links instead of the ones from blog.cloudflare