Comment by locknitpicker

Comment by locknitpicker 12 hours ago

> I'm very surprised to see all of the negativity toward Cloudflare's usability and value here.

As someone who uses Cloudflare at a professional level, I don't. To me each and every single service provided by Cloudflare feels somewhere between not ready for production or lacking any semblance of a product manager. Everything feels unreliable and brittle. Even the portal. I understand they are rushing to release a bunch of offerings, but this rush does surface in their offerings.

One of my pet peeves is Cloudflare's Cache API in Cloudflare Workers, and how Cloudflare's sanctioned approach to cache POST requests is to play tricks with the request, such as manipulate HTTP verb, URL, and headers, until it somehow works. It's ass-backwards. They own the caching infrastructure, they own the js runtime, they designed and are responsible for the DX, but all they choose to offer is a kludge.

Also, Cloudflare Workers are somehow deemed as customizable request pipelines, but other Cloudflare products such as Cloudflare Images service can't be used with Workers as it fails to support forwarding standard request headers.

I could go on and on, but ranting won't improve anything.

hyghjiyhu 10 hours ago

Post requests aren't really meant for repeatable stuff though. Even browsers will ask for confirmation before letting you reload the result of a post request. I think you are holding it wrong.

Now I get it things happen and you gotta do what you gotta do but then you aren't on the happy path anymore and you can't have the same expectations.

Reply View 1 reply

locknitpicker 9 hours ago

> Post requests aren't really meant for repeatable stuff though.
That's simply wrong. Things like GraphQL beg to differ. Anyone can scream this until they are red in the face but the need to cache responses from non-GET requests is pervasive. I mean, if it wasn't then why do you think Cloudflare recommends hacks to get around them?
https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/examples/cache-pos...
Your blend of argument might have had a theoretical leg to stand on if Cloudflare didn't went out of it's way to put together official examples on how to cache POST requests.

Reply View | 0 replies

kentonv 11 hours ago

The Cache API is a web-standard API. We chose to follow it in an attempt to follow standards. Unfortunately it turned out to be a poor fit. Among other things, as you note, the "cache key" is required to be HTTP-request-shaped, but must be a GET request, so to cache the result of a POST request you have to create a fake GET request that encodes the unique cache key in the URL. The keys should have just been strings computed by the app all along, but that's not what the standard says.

We'll likely replace it at some point with a non-standard API that works better. People will then accuse us of trying to create lock-in. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Reply View 2 replies

locknitpicker 9 hours ago

> The Cache API is a web-standard API. We chose to follow it in an attempt to follow standards.
That's perfectly fine, but it doesn't justify the lack of support for non-GET requests though. The Cache API represents the interface but you dictate what you choose how to implement it. In fact, Cloudflare's cache API docs feature some remarks on how Cloudflare chose to implement some details a certain way and chose to not implement at all some parts of Cache API.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/cache...
Also, the Cache API specification doesn't exclude support for non-GET requests.
https://w3c.github.io/ServiceWorker/#cache-put
If Cloudflare's Cache API implementation suddenly supported POST requests, the only observable behavior change would be that cache.put() would no longer throw an error for requests other than GET. This is hardly an unacceptable change.

Reply View | 1 reply
- kentonv 8 hours ago
  
  We can't implement automatic caching of POST requests because there is no standard for computing cache keys for POST requests; it's different for every application.
  E.g. presumably the body of the request matters for cache matching, but the body can be any arbitrary format the application chooses. The platform has no idea how to normalize it to compute a consistent cache key -- except perhaps to match the whole body byte-for-byte, but for many apps that would not produce the desired behavior. For example, if you had a trace ID in your requests, now none of your requests would hit cache because each one has a unique trace ID, but of course a trace ID is not intended to be considered for caching.
  The Cache API can only implement the semantics that the HTTP standard specifies for caching, and the HTTP standard does not specify any semantics for caching POST requests.
  That said, what we really should have done was left it up to the application to compute cache keys however they want, and only implemented the lookup from string cache key -> Response object. That's not what the standard says, though.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies