What Kenton Varda thinks about the cloud
Engineer at Cloudflare who designed Workers, Durable Objects and Cap’n Proto; earlier the primary author of Protocol Buffers v2 at Google, and co-founder of Sandstorm.io.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗ Who they are, on wiqqi ↗
Kenton Varda did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
6 dated positions, 2014 to 2021, in their own words. Our reading of what Kenton Varda has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsIn the old world, if the Node.js maintainers decide to make a breaking change to an obscure API between releases, it's OK. Downstream developers are expected to test their code before upgrading, and address any breakages. But in the serverless world, it's not OK: developers have no control over when upgrades happen, therefore upgrades must never break anything.
↗Backwards-compatibility in Cloudflare Workersblog.cloudflare.com
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Their wordsSecond, part of the promise of serverless is that developers shouldn't have to worry about updating their stack. If we start letting people pin old versions, then we have to start telling people how long they are allowed to do so, alerting people about security updates, giving people documentation that differentiates versions, and so on. We don't want developers to have to think about any of that.
↗Backwards-compatibility in Cloudflare Workersblog.cloudflare.com
- 4 years earlier
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Their wordsWe believe the true dream of cloud computing is that your code lives in the network itself. Your code doesn't run in "us-west-4" or "South Central Asia (Mumbai)", it runs everywhere.
- 19 months earlier
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Their wordsThe only way to solve these problems is by decentralizing the software (not just the storage). Software must be provided as a package – not as a service – with each user running their own private copy.
- 2 years earlier
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Their wordsIn today’s popular software-as-a-service model, indie development simply is not viable. People do it anyway, but their software is not accessible to the masses. In order for low-budget software to succeed, and in order for open source to make any sense at all, users must be able to run their own instances of the software, at no cost to the developer.
↗Open Source Web Apps Aren't Viable; Let's Fix Thatsandstorm.io
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Their wordsSoftware-as-a-Service and open source just don’t make sense together. It’s not really open source if you can’t run modified code, and the high barrier to entry shuts out hobby projects or anything unwilling to be monetized.
↗Open Source Web Apps Aren't Viable; Let's Fix Thatsandstorm.io