I'm having trouble understanding/believing this, given that Cloudflare Workers are also v8 isolates and run vastly faster than the 25-40ms that netlify says their isolates took...
irq-1 19 minutes ago [-]
> In the past, requests went out to a hosted execution service. Today, they run on MicroVMs inside our own edge network
The isolates were not being run at the edge.
phickey 20 minutes ago [-]
from the article: "With our old infrastructure it went out over the internet, ran the edge function, and came back to us to pass on. With the new compute platform, the request is forwarded to a compute node within our network."
As far as I know, Cloudflare Workers have always executed within Cloudflare's network, not gone out to the internet and executed elsewhere (which I read as being in a hyperscaler cloud).
aaronvg 48 minutes ago [-]
Wish it explained where the v8 isolate latency is coming from compared to microvms
wmf 21 minutes ago [-]
"In the past, requests went out to a hosted execution service."
They were outsourcing to another company so there's plenty of room for overhead to creep in.
vmg12 44 minutes ago [-]
v8 isolates aren't actually a great sandbox and I would not trust them implicitly in the AI era. This is probably why they wrap them in an additional sandbox.
dummydummy1234 22 minutes ago [-]
Why are v8 isolates bad, I see speculative execution hacks, but are there others?
phickey 13 minutes ago [-]
Despite naming them isolates, the V8 team does not consider them to be a security boundary.
binsquare 14 minutes ago [-]
v8 isolates are still shared kernel
while microvm's are separate kernel + hardware virtualization through hypervisor guarantees
I wouldn't call it bad either, just different tools for different things
secondcoming 15 minutes ago [-]
If you're counting milliseconds why use Javascript?
wmf 9 minutes ago [-]
V8 is extremely optimized for script startup time.
TaupeRanger 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
CharlesW 57 minutes ago [-]
This is technical content, written for a technical audience, being shared on HN. In that context, it's not particularly esoteric. If "5x faster Edge Functions" means nothing to you, that's a good signal that you can just skip it without FOMO. If you're familiar with the concept but not Firecracker (a popular microVM) specifically, the expectation is that you'll use search engines and/or LLMs to get up to speed.
Rendered at 20:10:33 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The isolates were not being run at the edge.
As far as I know, Cloudflare Workers have always executed within Cloudflare's network, not gone out to the internet and executed elsewhere (which I read as being in a hyperscaler cloud).
They were outsourcing to another company so there's plenty of room for overhead to creep in.
while microvm's are separate kernel + hardware virtualization through hypervisor guarantees
I wouldn't call it bad either, just different tools for different things