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...
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).
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.
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.
We also did a couple of write ups if you're interested:
- https://unikraft.com/blog/netlify-edge-functions
- https://unikraft.com/customer-stories/edge-functions-netlify
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