Cloudflare Ditches Nginx For In-House, Rust-Written Pingora

[phoronix]

Phoronix: CloudFlare Ditches Nginx For In-House, Rust-Written Pingora

CloudFlare has long relied upon Nginx as part of its HTTP proxy stack but now has replaced it with their in-house, Rust-written Pingora software that is said to be serving over one trillion requests per day and delivering better performance while only using about a third of the CPU and memory resources...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/CloudFlare-Pingora-No-Nginx

[Anux]

Not bad, 70 % less resources is a real deal in this business. They probably got back the development money for this project after one month.

Let's see what our dear Rust haters come up with this time.

[ATLief]

Noooo. I mean good for CF, but I really hope Nginx doesn’t get left behind.

[Volta]

CloudFlare has long relied upon Nginx as part of its HTTP proxy stack but now has replaced it with their in-house, Rust-written Pingora

Nice, but their servers are running on what?

[kozman]

When I read this and saw the high double-digit reduction in memory and CPU use I was floored. That's just amazing and will probably only get better as Rust features get improved and stabilized down the road. If this is what they're getting out of Rust in late 2022, I imagine they'll squeeze out more perf by this time next year. Or who knows, once it goes open source, all the Rust ninjas and users who'll want to benefit from Pingora will find ways to augment it further.

I was also sitting here wondering if this kind of implementation in Rust could happen for io_uring? Meaning, can Rust do for io_uring (hi Jens!) what it did for Pingora or is it apples and oranges?

[Danny3]

I now wonder if Cloudfare has contributed anything to Linux?
Did they submit any patch to optimize the networking stack or whatever for their needs?

[CommunityMember]

Not bad, 70 % less resources is a real deal in this business. They probably got back the development money for this project after one month

Given Cloudflare's scale, they would likely get the investment back even sooner if they are paying per kwh in their data centers, although it may take longer if it means pushing out new server deployments since they now need fewer servers (which could mean AMD and Intel may need to change guidance).

[CommunityMember]

That's just amazing and will probably only get better as Rust features get improved and stabilized down the road. If this is what they're getting our of Rust in late 2022,

To be fair, replacing LUA code (which Cloudflare had used to extend the ngnix capability) resulted in some of their major improvements, not just rewriting core ngnix functionality (although that, too, helped performance due to some limitations of nginx at Cloudflare scale, which is not your normal use case).

[kozman]

To be fair, replacing LUA code (which Cloudflare had used to extend the ngnix capability) resulted in some of their major improvements, not just rewriting core ngnix functionality (although that, too, helped performance due to some limitations of nginx at Cloudflare scale, which is not your normal use case).

No, I agree. It's top of the pyramid stuff here, not small datacenter stuff. I'm sure nginx benefited greatly from their contributions. But I suppose now it'll now light a fire under nginx devs to evaluate where they have some shortcomings and work on those areas. Losing Cloudflare is kind of a big deal but lets see how Cloudflares solution pans out in the long term. Benchmarks, however impressive, don't speak to longevity. <grabs popcorn>

[kozman]

Given Cloudflare's scale, they would likely get the investment back even sooner if they are paying per kwh in their data centers, although it may take longer if it means pushing out new server deployments since they now need fewer servers (which could mean AMD and Intel may need to change guidance).

I'd love to see what their saving come out to be over a years worth of solid use. Cost savings always sway opinions if they have solid and stable performance metrics to back them up. Show us the numbers and then follow the cost savings. If they jive, we'll see rapid adoption if and when they open source it. Of course, if I were Cloudflare I'd almost hesitate to open source since it could give them a huge service and cost savings advantage and kick their major competitors in the nuts. How many for-profit outfits do you know that would release a tool to help their competition?