Rita Kozlov
Appearances
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
workers and pages convergence, users are always asking for better performance. So there are things that in some ways, you know, we start planning for it quarters ahead of time because that's a part of our roadmap. But then, you know, we start kind of planning the week generally about,
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
And you're like, oh, you know, in retrospect, that was a mistake. Or I'm so glad we did that versus, you know, because it really does take a long time for these things to play out. Like in one or two years, you only see the beginnings, if any, of the ramifications of the different choices. And yeah, I think it's always there's a quote for this or something like that.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
But anyway, yeah, you get less done, I think, in a year than you set out to. But at the same time, you get more done, I think, in five years than you would have thought you would. So when I look at how much is available on the platform now in terms of, you know, like primitives, that blows my mind. I don't think I would have predicted that we would at this point have
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
He doesn't like me. That's okay.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
object storage, queues, workflows, logs, like there are so many AI, there are so many products. But then there are other things that, you know, one of the first PRDs that I worked on at some point was gradual rollouts. I think that was one of the first things that Kenton and I talked about.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I would talk to a customer and they'd be like, you know, it's super cool that I can push out a change and it's live to your network of 200 data centers in less than 30 seconds. But that also terrifies me. Can I please have a lover by which it happens over time? And there's this weird thing that happens where you're like, yes, that makes a ton of sense. Let's start building it.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
And then a ton of stuff gets in the way where you're like, OK, but we really need to do this first. priority and this is another priority and all of these things kind of come up and there's unexpected complexity because this is another thing about, you know, building something for a long time is, you know, as you grow, you get more teams, there's more interdependencies.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
So all of a sudden you realize like, okay, we built, you know, the like that part, but we need this other part and we need to connect these dots. And so, yeah, certain things definitely take longer than you expect them to. And then other things, A year ago, you were asking about how these innovation weeks come together. And, you know, probably like a month and a half, two months before that.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Last year's birthday week, we're like, we have to get AI running on Cloudflare. And we'd announced Constellation previously, which was the original iteration of it. And that was where we got a lot of feedback that was like, this is cool, but I need GPUs. And we went from idea to...
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
ai running on gpus all over our edge in less than two months so that's yeah kind of thing where you would expect it to take longer and you know that's the magic sometimes of having a deadline or forcing function is we're just like we just don't have the time for it to take a long time so it's just going to happen real fast
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
a couple months out, about a quarter out, and we start to look at, okay, well, these are all of the things that are happening. These are the things that are launching. What's kind of interesting out of that and start to piece together out of that, okay,
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Yeah, I think to your point about having primitives, right, that's where, I mean, what allows us to sometimes get the stuff running so quickly is we build on workers. A lot of our new announcements are built on workers. So at the very least, getting to a POC can happen really quickly. Workers, AI...
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
is actually largely runs on something that we talked about during birthday week, runs on containers. This is a big conversation that we've been having internally about, is that something that we expose to customers or not? The fact that we've had this platform for some time and we originally built it for Cloudflare runs a browser isolation product as a part of our zero trust suite.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
And you need a container for that. So we've had that platform for a while. And the fact that, you know, that was something that we had and we had a team that was ready to go and build on it made it that much, you know, the cold start was much faster on that.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
these are the stories that we want to tell during the week this is what we want people to come away with and uh you know refining that and sometimes that leads to new announcements that emerge that were like you know we weren't planning on doing that but maybe that makes sense for this week and yeah yeah it's always funny for me to see all of that because
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I'm curious to actually hear more from you about what your experience has been And, you know, to your point of on one hand, it unlocks so many things and I think really changes people's perception of what's possible. On the other hand, yeah, it was really interesting. You know, I think we were all wondering how that announcement was going to go and what people's takeaways were.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
And the takeaway surprised me. A little bit, or maybe surprise is the wrong word. But yeah, I'm very curious to see what happens when we actually put this in people's hands. And so we'd love to hear about your experience of making that shift from serverless to containers. And did you see things that surprised you? Are people using it in the way that you expected?
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Are people doing things that you're like, you know, this is... Not how I would advise you to do it, but knock yourself out.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I mean, people mixing all that stuff together, I think, is the really interesting part. And that's what we hope people will take away from this is that, yeah, you now have another tool in your arsenal that allows you to complete the picture or, you know, yeah, you don't have to... force everything into the same model.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
But at the same time, you know, the thing that I thought was kind of interesting is I really think people see the word containers and stop reading. Which is not too surprising, I suppose, in some ways. There are literally some things like... I saw questions when we announced this that are like, does this run on Firecracker? And it, there's literally a subset that's like that.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Having been doing this for seven years, one thing that you realize is distributed computing is really hard. I mean, computing actually period is really hard, right? That's the challenge that most people have with applications. And if containers were perfect, then what would we even be doing in the first place?
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Because, you know, people have Kubernetes, like, why wouldn't they just happily be running that? And I think the reality is, There are a lot of challenges that come with that, both from if you have a distributed audience standpoint, which most people do, from a scaling standpoint and how many resources it takes.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I mean, to be honest, we're the same way. And so, first of all, we build in public so much. Our docs are open source. We have our Discord. So if you're paying close attention, nothing that we announced last week would have come as like a huge surprise, right? And yeah, you'll see in the weeks leading up to it, myself and Matt and Dane and a bunch of engineers on the team kind of, you know,
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
And, you know, I think that that's kind of been the longtime argument about serverless versus not is... Yes, you can run your $5 VPS, but most things scale beyond that. And then do you want to spend your team's time on that or do you want to offload that to someone else? And a lot of what I think historically has been done with serverless and where we saw the opportunity with workers was that
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
If you try to build serverless on top of containers, you end up with something that's not really all that serverless because it's an abstraction and it gets leaked really quickly. You're still dealing with regions. You're still dealing with concurrency. You're still paying for idle time. And workers flipped all of that on its head. And so...
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
if you're looking for something really serverless, workers is just, it's going to be better. And yeah, we've had so many conversations with people over the years where they would be like, why doesn't Cloudflare just let me run a container? And you would start asking them questions of, you know, okay, well, what would you do if we let you do that?
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
And they'd be like, okay, well, I have a Go application and I just want to run it on Cloudflare's Edge. It's like, okay, do you want to run it in all 200 data centers? And sometimes they would be like, yeah. And you're like, okay, do you want to pay for it to be running 200 times? Yeah.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
And they're like, no, you know, or like the other trade off that people didn't realize is like, okay, well, now our request can hit any one of these 250 data centers and. it's going to cold start. So you got closer to the user, but your net performance is negative, not positive, right? Is that what you want? And people are like, oh, haven't thought about that. No, that's not what I want.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
And so that's where I really think the devil is going to be in the details and in the use cases and Yeah, I think a lot of the interesting possibilities are going to be where we can abstract away a lot of that by combining it with things like durable objects, where in most cases, I guarantee you actually don't need a container running in 250 data centers.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
But we have the ability to be really smart about where we place your container so that it is always warm, so that it is closer to user's You can do a lot of things that, you know, where serverless was traditionally kind of associated with stateless. All of a sudden you can maintain state and do things like, you know, build games and all that kind of stuff.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
So, and, you know, again, if I think about some of our use cases for it. Um, something like CICD, I think is a great example where it's something that's slightly longer running. It's not on the critical path of, it's not something that you expect to be instantaneous, right?
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
So we can kind of schedule it wherever we can actually in this instance, make it really cheap because, uh, you know, during certain times of day, we have data centers that don't receive as much traffic. We can schedule it over there and pass the cost savings onto you. So I think in some ways, uh,
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
leaking sounds so dramatic but really we're excited about what's coming and we can't shut up about it so some companies are stealthier we're we're really bad at stealth we're like everything's out in the open but uh if you're not paying that much attention then you know this is your time to kind of tune in and we really try to then spell out okay here's the stuff that launched
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Yeah. You touched on two things that I think are really interesting, maybe three. But the first is, you know, that setting up Kubernetes and scheduling everything was kind of how you'd always done stuff. And I think that in that way, You know, people always ask, like, what's the best DX? And I think the best DX is the thing that you're used to.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
That's the thing that's always going to – it's not an objective thing, right? It's actually – it's going to be the thing that feels the fastest to you. And that's something that we think about a lot is, like, how do we – we have this actually pretty different programming paradigm.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
And so how do we expose it in a way that does feel familiar so that you don't feel like you're relearning everything because – When you do have to do that, it does feel like this really big hurdle of like, Okay, I know that my way of doing this is inefficient and requires like five for loops and that doesn't make sense, but at least I'll get it done and I can call it a day.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
So, yeah, you know, that's why we've been working on the NodeCompat stuff and I think that containers is going to go a really long way there of just giving people something to hold on to that feels familiar and kind of get started from that. But, yeah, I think that the second thing that's really interesting here is, to your point, it did...
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
All of that compliance stuff didn't matter to you when you were building as an individual. And at the same time, you know, that difference between like $15 and $45 felt really significant to you. And I feel like that's where things sometimes get lost in the Twitter conversation too. You know, I think it's great that there's such a big community of people. You know, I think we're both that way.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
We just like to build stuff in our spare time. And it's a great way to learn new technologies. But what you need for, you know, your business, blog or your side project or whatever is so different from the requirements of a company. And that's where, yeah, knock yourself out setting up Docker on a $5 VPS. It just doesn't matter.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
But when you're running in production and you're doing this as a part of a multi-million, multi-billion dollar business where literally every second of latency correlates with revenue, where, yeah, you have compliance requirements to meet, where, you know, people's time really adds up.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
If you think about, you know, the cost of an engineer, $100,000 even starts to look pretty small compared to, you know, all of the alternatives. Yeah.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Yeah, I think that's going to become even more interesting in some ways in the AI age where... the productivity of a single person can go so much further in some ways, right?
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
And so, yeah, I do wonder if especially, yeah, like as a small startup, as a team of three, you can go so far so fast just bootstrapping things and building in a serverless way that, yeah, I wonder if there's going to be like even more and more scrutiny over, you know, build versus buy and what's the, you know, liability of growing a team.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Yeah.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
You know, I really admire companies like Apple where everything is, you know, super on lockdown. And, you know, part of me wonders, is that something that you mature into? But realistically, I think it's either something that is or isn't in your DNA. And that's just really not who we are.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I think also to your point about if you're managing a bunch of servers and then you look at something like the cloud and you're like, oh, that's so much more expensive and I'm still managing Servers, if you've been doing that and you have a team that has that in-house expertise, then it makes sense to keep doing that in some way.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
But if I think back to your comment about the product is growing, we need to hire more people in order to keep up with customer demand and all of that. The availability of talent, I think, is something that everyone in this industry struggles with. And so then I think the question also becomes, you know, I think your odds of being able to hire someone that's really capable and
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I think that there's this aspect of, sorry, I'm struggling to think of the word, but barrier to entry effectively. You can get a really smart engineer that if you give them the tools that they need vis-a-vis serverless can get running just slinging code versus I think finding people
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
that if we take the example of literally managing physical servers, there are just far, far fewer people in the world that are capable to do that. So again, like calibrating that, who is your next hire going to be? And, you know, do you want to spend a bunch of money trying to get talent that's very uniquely specialized and knows how to do all this stuff? Or, you know, like,
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Today, you can get a really great college grad, especially, you know, with the help of AI that is going to be able to, you know, get running so much faster if, you know, all they have to do is figure out how to run JavaScript.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
It's definitely my favorite. Every day, I'm just savoring. There are, I think, like 16 weeks in the year, maybe a little less than that, where New York is just perfect. And they're spread across fall and spring. And every day of those, I don't want to leave.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I think the way that you feel about winter is how I feel about summer. Where winter, I'm like, I can handle, I can be cozy versus I don't deal with the heat very well. So that's how I feel in the spring where I'm like, oh God, the temperatures are rising. It's coming.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I know exactly what you're talking about. And yeah, it's like, it's always somehow a Friday. That's the first magical day. And yeah, everyone is just having the best time of their lives. It's so cute.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Great. I'm going to assume that then.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
No, I know exactly what you mean. I used to live in San Francisco. And it's funny, I was just there last week for for birthday week. And every time I visit now, it is actually it's New York Falls weather, but year round, which for me is actually I'm like, that's my perfect climate. I know some people have Miami or San Diego where it's sunny.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
For me, I'm like, this is ideal. And sometimes I'm like, I can't believe I left this weather behind. But there is a nice thing about the rhythm where you're always looking forward to something. And yeah, there's these changes and you get different produce and everything.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Number one rule of Fight Club.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I mean, you think of October and Halloween and you think of Christmas, you imagine Meg Ryan in New York in the appropriate weather. If you transplant Meg Ryan into Miami, it makes no sense.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I think over more than just the rest of the US. So my partner is from Australia. And so I never really thought about it, but their Christmas is in the summer. And so, yeah, you know, like Christmas barbecue. Yeah.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Santa and watermelon and barbecue? Get out of here.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
That's right.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Do you even own a jacket?
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Like Antarctica or something.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
You might as well. I don't know. It does get pretty chilly, especially in the mornings. What you just made me think of with the layering is the funny thing about
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
san francisco and the thing that i do cherish about new york summers is that it's warm in the evenings versus in san francisco you can have the most beautiful sunny day and then the second the sun sets if you didn't think ahead and bring layers you just go to instant freezing oh yeah i hate that i'm so bad with that stuff i'm having to be in new york too in certain times of the year when it was like that uh yeah
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Just instant overstimulation.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I think that's why fall is the supreme season. So today the weather is like you can wear a sweater outside, but you don't need a jacket, which I feel like there's maybe actually like two weeks in the year that are like that.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
It's such a weird feeling. I do experience it every time I'm back in SF, especially because the last couple of years of me being in San Francisco were during the pandemic. And so there are the years that I spent going to the office. And so, and then there was all this time that I didn't.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Yeah. I mean, the other thing too, is we want feedback on stuff that we're building. So to your point, right. And iPhone, you ship it out and it's out there and that's it. And you can ship software updates, which also, if you're like me, you're maybe always a little bit behind because, uh, Who has time for that? But yeah, you ship the iPhones and they're in people's hands and that's it.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
And now every time I'm in San Francisco and I go to the San Francisco office, especially in Soma, in that area, it feels like I have so many memories, but also I was such a different person
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Yeah. Are you, are you going to drop a sneak peek of what, what you guys have planned or are you going to, are you going to manage to keep a secret?
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Oh boy, rough edges. Let's go fix them. So yeah, if you want to cover more for us, actually, we're doing an internal thing called Fixed Oberfest. So this month, we are very focused on our own observability and sanding down all of those rough edges and finding paper cuts and fixing them. So this is a perfect time to erase all those things.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Thanks for having me.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Versus for us, a big part of the reason that we let people play with stuff early or we pre-announce it, we do a lot of betas is because we want feedback. And by the time that we're launching something, and this is something that also is actually us developing a bit of a new muscle and something that's changed a bit over the years.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
is, yeah, we take a bit more time to bake things in, to receive feedback. So the thing that launches on the day of the innovation week is much readier, has gone through a few iterations. Previously, we would first announce something and then put it into people's hands and then iterate from there. And there's pros and cons to both approaches.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
And still, depending on the announcement, we like to have both in our arsenal, but a lot of the feedback. And I think especially for developer tools, it's just so much more fun if something is announced and instantly you can NPM install or whatever. The first thing you want to do is like, let me play with this. Yeah.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I think that's much more interesting and a lot more fun for us too, because then on those announcement days, we get to kick back and look at the Discord and people are asking questions or they're like, look, Ma, I built this thing. You're like, I just announced it. How did you already do that?
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
But I think that that's kind of the fun part, too, of working on developer tools. Yeah. Sometimes you don't even announce something at all. It's just an API and someone will find it and someone will build on top of it. And I forget what the there's a name for this law.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Yeah. Matt, the second he listens to this, will be like, Rita, it's obviously this.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
You don't get to look it out and sound extra smart.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
I've been at Cloudflare for over eight years now.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
Launching is exhausting, but it is also really fun. So a little bit of both. I had the weekend to recover, and so now I'm mostly pumped.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
It's a config, it's not Turing complete, but it is very, very expressive. And we saw a few challenges there.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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,
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
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.
How About Tomorrow?
Rita Kozlov on Building In Public, Cloudflare's Birthday Week, and How Long Software Actually Takes
a six-month effort like how long are you are you in like okay we're prepping for birthday week mode it really depends i mean everything that we announce uh and especially this past birthday week uh came from user feedback and things that were already on our roadmap because users have been asking for logs users have been asking about you know