Rita Kozlov
speaker
102 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Rita Kozlov’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I've been at Cloudflare for over eight years now.
It started seven years ago, or I guess a little bit more than that. But... the, the first product that we announced in the space was workers. And, you know, the, the original, original intent of workers was, okay, we have, um, we have this network. We have, some people use it for CDN, other people use it for WAF and security. We're trying to expose all these services through it.
And there were kind of two parts to it. One, which is, uh, You know, we looked internally at our own pace of innovation. We're like, wow, we need to be able to go faster. And in parallel, our customers were getting more sophisticated. So they wanted to do, you know, crazier and crazier stuff that page rules just wouldn't cut it for.
Page rules were like, oh, you give me the URL and you can, you know. cache everything on that URL, but people started to want to do things by headers, by country, by cookie, and take all of these complicated actions. So we're like, okay, we need something that will allow people to just write code and deploy it. And we need a platform for ourselves. And so we released workers.
And if you go back to the announcement blog post for workers, you'll see a bunch of examples that are kind of around, you know, adding headers, caching things, but you quickly realize, oh, wait, I have an origin actually that's running, like if I can write code, In this very serverless way, like, what else can I do? It's crazy. Innovation is crazy in that way.
You come up with something for one thing, and then you realize how many other things are possible. And that was the beginning of the developer platform. And then we're like, okay, well, now if I want to be able to build something a bit more meaningful, I need storage. So then we introduced KV, and that was, you know... pretty limited in what it could do, but it exposed a ton of use cases.
And then we're like, okay, what's the next thing that people need to be able to do? Oh, they need all these deployment tools. So, you know, we released Wrangler and worker sites, which was the first iteration of Pages and then became Pages. And then we've continued to add different primitives.
Yep, to the point where today, you know, people are building full stack applications that I think were well beyond our imagination when we first started working on this.
Yeah, it's interesting. As you were saying this, I was like, wow, actually there are so many different approaches to this. Before we actually embarked on workers, one of the things that we're looking at because that's what so many Fastly users had was VCL. That's a really, really complex, at the end of the day, it stands for varnish configuration language.
It's a config, it's not Turing complete, but it is very, very expressive. And we saw a few challenges there.
One, which was if you compare the number of people in the world that understand JavaScript versus people that understand VCL, like every time I would talk to a customer that was, you know, looking at moving to us, they would just be a little terrified because it's like, oh, well, Josh knows our VCL configuration and God forbid if Josh leaves or maybe Josh did leave.
And then you're talking to this team that's like, Yeah, I don't know what this does and I'm terrified to touch it because everything's gonna go haywire. So that was one approach. And we knew from the beginning that we wanted something more programmatic than that because you can't do particularly complicated if statements or for loops or really express logic through that. And at the time,
AWS had Lambdas and they had Lambda at Edge. And both of these are slightly different approaches too, but Lambda at Edge, it's interesting too, because they have a couple of different definitions of Edge too. So it wasn't running in all of their CloudFront locations and was still container-based. So Again, but more limited.
But again, for us, we're like, okay, well, we're not going to deploy containers because that's going to introduce a cold start. And for our use case, that undoes everything that we're trying to do. And so, yeah, you have that approach. And then, yeah, they kind of have this new approach now. That that's a bit more in the middle.
But to your point, yeah, I think when I played around with it last time, I was trying to do something even like return a custom response. And you really are limited to there's an assumption of you're making a request to origin. You're going to get a response from the origin and you can modify kind of the metadata on either side of that. But you can't go too far beyond that.
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question of what layer is the right layer for configuration and what layer is just your application logic. And an interesting thing for us, too, was if you actually look at that original use case of I want to modify my CDN, actually a lot of
teams that manage Cloudflare that are an infrastructure team that's used to CDN management, they're a bit like, don't give me the Turing complete stuff. I don't manage a code base in that same way. Give me a way to just manage rules.
And so over time, we've actually still continued to build out this really complex rules engine that is much more of a configuration language because that's what those people want. And yeah, it turned out that this layer was much more suitable for okay, well, actually, I just want to write my application in this way.
And yeah, if you're a team that's, you know, an engineering team that's building features, then that's exactly how you want to write it. And you want to, you know, you have all of the development practices that you need in order to maintain this thing from, you know, source control to testing to, you know, the rest of it.
You know, if you told me seven years ago that I'd be working on this for seven years, I think I would be a little surprised, but you know, it's in some senses really rewarding in that. you know, not to get into career advice and things like that. But I think an interesting thing about working on something like this for such a long time is you get to see your decisions play out.
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