Comment by vavos
11 hours ago
It's cool that it's open-source, but how much effort and scale would it take to run it on non cloud flare infra?
11 hours ago
It's cool that it's open-source, but how much effort and scale would it take to run it on non cloud flare infra?
ffs there is literally no pleasing some people. "Hosting an open source project is too difficult! They should provide a free SaaS solution instead on their own cost but also no lock-in!!"
High switching costs is a form of lock-in "open source" or not.. This is something people with real experience making real decisions are well aware of..
I think it’s a legitimate question! Some companies operate at such a scale that if you tried to adopt their tools or services, it would be way too complex for the ROI.
Think Bazel or how K8s was for ~ever. For Google’s scale? Required. For a small team? A net-negative.
workerd stand-alone is designed to work well at small-medium scale.
If we open sourced Cloudflare's production scheduler, nobody would be able to use it because it is explicitly designed for HUGE, globe-spanning scale. Well, nobody except our direct competitors.
But the goal with workerd is actually that it should be pretty easy to run, about as easy as Node. Stateless workloads should scale trivially (just add more instances and load balance). For Durable Objects (statefull), currently it doesn't scale well at all, but I'm working on changes[0] so that it scales nicely across a cluster. I intentionally chose a design here that is operationally easy to set up. (Basically: just connect all the nodes to NFSv4.)
[0] https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/6780