looks like an answer to Cloudflare Workers

Isn't this a move in the other direction. Workers and traditional Lambda need to you write short lived event handlers; this is about running a standard server.

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mikeocool 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The real advantage of cloudflare workers is you don’t pay for the processing time while you’re waiting for upstream network responses.

I believe Cloudflare is the only FaaS that offers that. It makes it fantastic for putting a light weight layer in front of a few upstream API, like say inference providers.

	▲	syrusakbary 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I believe Cloudflare is the only FaaS that offers that Wasmer also offers the same (charging only for active CPU usage), with the advantage that you can run full Node.js and Python workloads https://wasmer.io/
	▲	jasonjmcghee 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And there are even hibernateable websockets too - only paying for when data is actually transferring. And the maximum worker time is based on processing time, not wall time.

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CharlieDigital 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Google Cloud Run and Azure Container Apps feels like the closest analogues.

Both allow deployment of web apps without an adapter layer. Both scale to zero (really useful for hobby apps; small internal apps that do not get sustained traffic, but can get bursty). Both allow concurrency control.

Cloud Run "family" is quite a nice way of managing serverless ("orchestrationless"?) containers. Cloud Run worker pools for background workers that connect to Pub/Sub. Cloud Run jobs for long running tasks like extracts, ETL. Cloud Run instances (newer offering) for always on agents.

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paduc 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Absolutely, and the offer is better in terms of DX (no need for an adapter) and it’s not limited to 128MB of memory.

Exciting times, I can’t wait for Cloudflares response.

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dzonga 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

but this is built on firecracker vm. while Cloudflare workers are built on v8 isolates. at the moment Cloudflare workers have no equivalent. Deno was the only one trying to do the same.

what will be interesting to see is startup times.

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AznHisoka 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Why doesnt Amazon or any hyperscale replicate Workers? After all they all have the scale of infrastructure

	▲	kentonv 27 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My biased take as the architect of Workers: It's a classic Clay Christensen innovator's dilemma. V8 isolates seem "worse" on their face (e.g. mostly incompatible with non-JS apps, more difficult to secure), while aiming down-market. The hyperscalers' biggest existing customers aren't asking for them; they are asking for more and better micro VMs to run their existing codebases. It's only the little guys looking to deploy greenfield apps with low ops overhead and on a tight budget that really appreciate the Workers model, and to AWS these seem like small potatoes. Meanwhile there's a huge amount of investment needed to build out this entirely new and different way of doing things (we've been working on it almost a decade now!). In the worst case, this investment is wasted, and in the best case, cannibalizes the existing product line. There likely many people at AWS who recognize the dilemma, but still cannot push the organization in the right direction. Too much inertia, too many stakeholders who don't get it, because it's unintuitive. When orgs get big they just cannot take disruptive steps, even when they were built on disruption in the past. They only finally come around after the new disruptor is eating their lunch, but by then it's too late.
	▲	felixgallo 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Probably because their solution is technically superior from a safety perspective?

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Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also vercel, railway, render etc

Cloudflare workers wasn’t always an 1:1 option for simple hosting (iirc) and people used to think it was more complicated than vercel etc but it has changed in recent years and right now they have made things smoother and simpler to compete with vercel and others.

Now that AWS has entered into the field as well, given that vercel and others already build on top of AWS. It will be interesting to see how this all goes.

I wonder if more og hyper scalers like say hetzner/ovh and others will also target this audience

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beastman82 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And appengine

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cowsandmilk 3 hours ago | parent [-]

A response to App Engine 18 years after its release?

	▲	beastman82 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's the same idea however you characterize it.