Generally these limits exist so customers don’t accidentally spend more than they intend to — e.g. implementing a sort of infinite loop where Lambdas call each other constantly. Sounds implausible but I’ve seen that more than once!
IMO that's not why they _really_ do it. They have limits on everything because even at their scale they can't instantly accommodate your needs to suddenly scale or they need to prevent "noisy neighbor" situations where your sudden excessive usage impacts others' workloads. They still have to do relatively short term capacity planning to accommodate you. Like, I work for only a medium-large sized company and AWS has quoted us lead times of _weeks_ to make the instances we need for a workload available. We only needed 200-300 EC2 instances and they weren't even super unusual types. I think their infinite scaling on a dime claims are pure marketing jibber jabber.
> Sounds implausible but I’ve seen that more than once!
The textbook example of this going wrong is a lambda that is invoked on uploading to S3 that writes the result to S3. There's even an AWS article on it - [0]
We actually got an email from AWS recently at work that said “hey! Your lambda writes to a queue that invokes the same lambda, that seems wack”. We need it that way, but it’s enough of a problem that they built a way to detect it automatically.
In principle I agree with this, but do feel this is said more readily about Cloudflare than other companies it could said about - such as Amazon (via AWS), Google and Microsoft.
Perhaps my own mental model is wrong, but I see them as a credible challenger to those very oligopolistic companies, and wish there were more Cloudflares.
The difference is that nobody complains and most people agree when you talk smack about Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The general consensus is that they're big, dumb and knowingly evil, and most of the time their actions can be explained by that.
When we talk smack about Cloudflare, such as about their hosting of phishing, their underhanded DoH stuff, their complete lack of abuse handling, et cetera, lots of people come to their defense and make excuses for them.
You can like a company's product and still think the company is big and desires to be evil, but there's an emotional component for some that makes "us versus them" knee-jerk reactions more compelling than, "hmmm... is this correct?" evaluations.
I don't think any of these Cloudflare apologists would try to argue on facts that Cloudflare isn't trying to be a monopoly, isn't trying to recentralize the Internet, isn't marginalizing the rest of the non-western world, isn't trying to establish dependencies that people and companies can't easily escape, but if they did, that'd make for some interesting discussion.
To each their own, but I think this is said more frequently about Cloudflare because they are often playing the middleman, via their CDN service. In comparison, AWS and others are the actual origin.
Its not just low end plans. Their pricing is basically the only one that feels fair.
They don't charge you for bandwidth, unlike others that try to make on it as much as possible, while at the same time having other services also priced significantly higher.
You might enjoy the SRE path, or other closely-associated roles. Being naturally apt at debugging / optimising systems is a huge asset for us, and you might find a lot of satisfaction that way.
Not from the company but we do something similar with opentelemetry. It’s true, because you pay for the total allocation of CPU/memory on Fargate, so you can add a sidecar container into that total allocation with a small deduction from the amount left available to the app itself.
E.g.
Before: 512MB for task, 512MB available for the application
After: 512MB for task, 412MB available for the application, 100MB available for sidecar
Yes, but even in your example, that's 20% of resources going to the sidecar. Not to mention sizing correctly multiple containers in a single task gets complicated.
This can be true, but I would argue not always. Some DevOps teams work in the old mode of “throwing code over to Ops to run” - this isn’t what DevOps intended, but happens.
When they work well, they’re doing things like authoring reusable (by product eng. teams) infrastructure modules, or helping to build “you build it, you run it” tooling like monitoring stacks etc. They’re also helpfully/hopefully subject matter experts on CI/CD, your cloud/hosting of choice, security stuff - things that general developers have mixed levels of interest or competence in.
Bit disingenuous to credential Tommy Robinson as a “citizen journalist”, given he’s notoriously the face of a far-right organisation and is a convicted, violent criminal.
That doesn’t mean he should have his speech curtailed, but does warrant an accurate portrayal if you’re using him as an example in an op-ed…
As someone on the “buy side” of Cloudflare-like services, that’s not how it works. How could a third party like Cloudflare protect my unprotected IP address? A very basic part of using a CDN/DDOS protection product is not allowing raw traffic to your origin server.
RE “as long as no one leaked their IP” - the IPv4 space is quite small. It’s trivial to scan it and discuss unadvertised, but ultimately very public, servers.
If customers don’t already have an understanding of both of these points, then they need to increase their competence in areas that are, frankly, pretty basic.
> How could a third party like Cloudflare protect my unprotected IP address?
Simple, they could scan the internet like I explained and notify their customers who’s site IP is findable this way with a big scary warning message. They could do this easily and cheaply, but for some reason they don’t.
My partner works in buying for physical retail (caveats: nothing to do with software, also she’s generally worked mid market and above, rather than anything high volume/low cost) and I believe _margin_ is often 30-60%, or a range similar to that. Larger retailers will also have agreements with suppliers where the margin is stipulated, I believe per SKU.
Obviously the comparison is slightly Apples to oranges, as physical retailers have massive overheads/COGS that Apple don’t incur for the App Store.
Those physical retailers aren't paying engineer salaries to sit around and develop new IDEs, develop the app store ecosystem, content moderators etc. I think people see "zomg - I'm paying Apple 30% for their app store" without realizing the end retailer often charges a fairly large markup to run their part of the business.
the platform development comes with sale of the platform - which is to say the customer has already paid to have it developed by buying the phone.
Many developers don't want to have apple be their gatekeeper for apps. They should be able to have alternatives. Apple's rent seeking behaviour is to take platform development in the cost of the device and again to distribute apps without any alternative.
It's already a competitive landscape. If you feel Apple is unfairly charging you extra for something, then you have a myriad number of Android and other phones to choose from.
On the other hand, if Apple's model allows them to better compete with others and create a superior product that people want ... well then, it's ridiculous to mandate they should do business a different way.
their business business model allows them to compete because they're rent seeking by grazing off developers and apps that dont want or need their app store, payment processor, etc.
Wow who knew rent seeking was massively profitable, huge surprise!
So you think the Samsung model is correct? That is, devices shouldn’t receive any updates after the initial purchase?
I will accept the argument that apple’s gatekeeping is ridiculous, a lot of that is the bizarre prudishness of the US, but saying that apple should not be compensated at a rate that is generally below the market - the majority of apps on the AppStore are freemium from which apple makes nothing, the remainder are mostly only paying a 15% commission. This is vs 30% or so on game consoles, 30% on steam, etc.
you're offering a false equivalence that isnt required for my argument to be true, so I'm going to say 'i never said that, you did,and you never managed to make a logical argument out of it yet'.
> The point is none of the third party app stores pay for any of the platform development ...
Isn't that because Apple doesn't allow for third party repos/stores/etc?
If that changes after all (I'm personally hoping it does), then it would make sense that the new alternative store(s) would have their own overheads (development, running costs, etc) and would have their own fees.
The other stores wouldn't be paying for the ongoing development and maintenance of the iOS, UIKit, OpenGL/Metal, etc. That stuff is NOT cheap to develop and maintain. The final app that you see is trivial compared to the mountain of libraries and frameworks that Apple provides.
