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Ari Kalfus
Ari Kalfus

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Who's Using Isolates? (Cloudflare article)

Has everyone read Cloudflare's recent article on cloud computing without containers? It's a very interesting comparison, from their perspective, on containers with Lambda vs. their setup using Isolates. This was a new technology for me. I didn't see any posts on the technology on dev.to when searching for "Isolates" so maybe this is new for a lot of you as well!

What are your thoughts on the article, and about the future of server-less cloud computing? Do you agree with Cloudflare in that Isolates are the long-term future? Have you used Isolates before - how was that experience?

Top comments (5)

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theodesp profile image
Theofanis Despoudis • • Edited

I say it was genius as it leverages existing technology in a new way.
Something like coroutines-as-a-service aka CaaS

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rhymes profile image
rhymes •

Reminds me also of Erlang's BEAM platform where each unit of work is an isolated process scheduled by the VM.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern •

Not me, but I’m definitely following it, and really excited about what Cloudflare is doing in general.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes •

V8 is an amazing piece of technology.

I can't wait for WebAssembly to get real traction so that we can deploy pieces of code in whatever language in these "isolates" :D

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern •

Seriously. This is incredibly cool stuff. It really makes it seem like all "modern" web development is kind of the awkward in-between phase between document serving and actual complex/performant applications.

I really hope Apple helps push some of this forward. They've been such laggards on web stuff. (Except making hardware which is awesome for mobile web)