The best programmers I know

This is what happens when you run your blog behind cloudflare workers - they want you on pages instead, or to pay $5/month forever on the off chance you get slashdotted...

replies(1): >>43630678 #

7. vanschelven ◴[09 Apr 25 09:49 UTC] No.43630461{3}[source]▶

>>43630389 #

I'm not sure what "huge loads" means in this context though.

Remember when nginx was written in 2002 to solve the C10K problem?

8. PeterStuer ◴[09 Apr 25 09:53 UTC] No.43630481{3}[source]▶

>>43630389 #

How would your static text only blog generate "huge loads" on a CDN?

9. StrLght ◴[09 Apr 25 09:56 UTC] No.43630486[source]▶

>>43630385 #

Cloudflare claims that Pages allow unlimited traffic [0]. So it seems like author is using Workers, probably on a free plan.

[0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/developer-platform/

replies(1): >>43630520 #

10. jumperabg ◴[09 Apr 25 10:04 UTC] No.43630520{3}[source]▶

>>43630486 #

Why would you run your site on Workers instead of the static content hosting? Aren't the workers supposed to be used in case you must do computational work for requests, connect to a db, do some work etc... ?

replies(3): >>43630737 #>>43630739 #>>43631689 #

11. hk__2 ◴[09 Apr 25 10:07 UTC] No.43630537[source]▶

>>43630255 (TP) #

The best programmers I know don’t use cheap hosting that rate-limit your static blog.

replies(5): >>43630579 #>>43630690 #>>43631030 #>>43631104 #>>43632893 #

12. amelius ◴[09 Apr 25 10:16 UTC] No.43630579[source]▶

>>43630537 #

The best programmers I know always find programming challenges everywhere, and a rate limit function was probably one of them.

13. ahofmann ◴[09 Apr 25 10:33 UTC] No.43630659{3}[source]▶

>>43630389 #

What do you mean? What is huge to you? For me a static blog on a small vps would start to crumble at around 30 to 150 requests per second. This number is broad because the are a lot of moving parts even in this scope. This results in 2.5 million to almost 13 million page views a day. To reach numbers like that you need to get reeeeaally popular. With some planning a static website can be served billions of times a day before saturating the network stack.

So what are you talking about?

14. josephg ◴[09 Apr 25 10:38 UTC] No.43630678{3}[source]▶

>>43630403 #

Honestly for good reason. Static blog content is trivially cacheable. Get that content into nginx!

15. szszrk ◴[09 Apr 25 10:40 UTC] No.43630690[source]▶

>>43630537 #

That's how I see devops applied in practice in some places - just replace ops with dev. Then things like this happen daily.

I don't blame the author at all - we should do "works most of the time" projects more often and stop caring that much about SLAs. But that downtime in an article that focuses on "Know Your Tools Really Well" is hilarious way of showing that dev and ops are rather different skill sets.

16. solardev ◴[09 Apr 25 10:48 UTC] No.43630737{4}[source]▶

>>43630520 #

Sometimes people use them as reverse proxies or to load stuff from cloud KV. You could probably build a web stack on it if you wanted to. But I think a static blog like this would be simple enough on Pages or behind the regular CDN.

17. StrLght ◴[09 Apr 25 10:49 UTC] No.43630739{4}[source]▶

>>43630520 #

I got curious about it too, found that author actually did a write-up on that in 2020 [0]. I don't know that much about Workers, but it sounds like it's needed for analytics?

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250328111057/https://endler.de...

replies(1): >>43637194 #

18. solardev ◴[09 Apr 25 10:50 UTC] No.43630746{3}[source]▶

>>43630399 #

Cloudflare is more IaaS. Some services can be for hosting (Pages) or caching (CDN), while Workers can be used and misused for a whole bunch of use cases. Not sure what the author's rationale is here.

19. Hamuko ◴[09 Apr 25 11:40 UTC] No.43631030[source]▶

>>43630537 #

At least my free Cloudflare-hosted blog was able to withstand being on the HN front page once. I think they've over-engineered their "static" site hosting to the point where it can fail under heavy traffic.

20. __jonas ◴[09 Apr 25 11:52 UTC] No.43631104[source]▶

>>43630537 #

The irony is that Cloudflare actually offers free static hosting with unlimited traffic, this just seems to run on a Cloudflare compute service for some reason? Perhaps it’s server rendered.

replies(1): >>43631332 #

21. hombre_fatal ◴[09 Apr 25 12:31 UTC] No.43631332{3}[source]▶

>>43631104 #

They are using Zola (Rust SSG) but I think they're serving from Worker + KV: https://github.com/mre/endler.dev/blob/32016d0f204911bc9a8a4...

They have a history of using static hosting (GH Pages) but prob decided it wasn't necessary when they switched to CF. And whipping up your own lil scheme using compute is more fun and it let them mirror the request to their analytics service.

I don't blame them: I'm so used to infinite free tiers especially from CF that without seeing my blog saturate the worker limit, I wouldn't have considered it.

replies(1): >>43632991 #

22. boarush ◴[09 Apr 25 13:13 UTC] No.43631689{4}[source]▶

>>43630520 #

Using Workers is now what Cloudflare recommends by default, with "Static Assets" to host all the static content for your website. Pages, as I understand, is already built on the Workers platform, so it's all just simplifying the DX for Cloudflare's platform and giving more options to choose what rendering strategy you use for your website.

23. reverendsteveii ◴[09 Apr 25 14:58 UTC] No.43632893[source]▶

>>43630537 #

I certainly would. Getting blasted w traffic because of an insightful post is an edge case that it doesn't make sense to design around and I'm not really gonna want my personal blog to be a time or money sink when I could be spending either on things that I like more than that. So I'm gonna go with the free tier of something that provides basic protection and availability and if I do get hug-of-death'd by some content aggregator or another it's no real loss to me that they use the wayback machine rather than hit my page directly because I'm not monetizing.

24. ryandrake ◴[09 Apr 25 15:07 UTC] No.43632991{4}[source]▶

>>43631332 #

The idea that you need "workers" and compute to serve 10KB of words...

replies(1): >>43635635 #

25. hombre_fatal ◴[09 Apr 25 18:29 UTC] No.43635635{5}[source]▶

>>43632991 #

HN mindset:

- When I do something, I did it understanding that's what I had the limited time/attention for and you should give me grace, especially when I'm dicking around with my personal blog on a Saturday afternoon.

- When other people do something, they engineered what they thought was the necessary + perfect solution, and they chose that exact impl after every option was evaluated to its end, and I will criticize them accordingly.

26. mre ◴[09 Apr 25 20:05 UTC] No.43637194{5}[source]▶

>>43630739 #

Author here. That's the answer.

Or at least it used to be the answer when I still cared about analytics. Nowadays, friends send me a message when they find my stuff on social media, but I long stopped caring about karma points. This isn't me humblebragging, but just getting older.

The longer answer is that I got curious about Cloudflare workers when they got announced. I wanted to run some Rust on the edge! Turns out I never got around to doing anything useful with it and later was too busy to move the site back to GH pages. Also, Cloudflare workers is free for 100k requests, which gave me some headroom. (Although I lately get closer to that ceiling during good, "non-frontpage" days, because of all the extra bot traffic and my RSS feed...)

But of course, the HN crowd just saw that the site was down and assumed incompetence. ;) I bury this comment here in the hope that only the people who care to hear the real story will find it. You're one of them because you did your own research. This already sets you apart from the rest.