A decently big casino, as you could guess from the article, was getting away with Cloudflare's Business Plan (250$/month, which even the author in the post agrees was a "fairly low price", likely downplaying it).
The Cloudflare team reached out to them to let them know their usage does not fit into the tier anymore and they need to pay the custom price of an Enterprise plan, which may, or may not have been fair since the author does not provide any relevant data, because they were cut off from the stats since they had their account terminated.
The casino refused and indicated they are at talks with Fastly, which was a stupid thing to tell to the CF team, because on their end it was looking like "yeah, we're going to keep freeloading until we move to another company", so they decided to terminate the casino's account.
The story taught the author not to rely on proprietary services. I hope it might also teach them not to rely on any service if they are getting away with a price that is way too cheap for the resources they consume.
With all that said, Cloudflare has shown that they cannot be relied upon. No business can work with a supplier that will just suddenly cut you off without there being some clear breach of contract and the possibility to clear things up.
The behavior from Cloudflare shown here is what you expect from some shady Russian "cheapo SaaS for you!"-provider.
When you don't play by their rules and freeload the shit out of their plan and thus violate their terms of service... yeah Termination happens, tough love.
I think there would be more sympathy if Cloudflare pointed to a specific limit breached and proposed ways to get into compliance at their current price plan.
"Service XYZ is now consuming 500% of expected quota. Shut it down or we need to get you on a bigger plan." is actionable and meaningful, and feels a little less like a shakedown.
I'm sick of "unlimited" services that really mean "there's a limit but we aren't going to say what it is." By that standard, freaking mobile telecoms are far more transparent and good-faith players!
Perhaps this also represents a failing in Cloudflare's product matrix. Everyone loves the "contact sales for a bespoke enterprise plan" model, but you should be creating a clear road to it, and faux-unlimited isn't it. Not everyone needs $random_enterprise_feature, so there's value in a disclosed quota and pay-as-you-scale approach: the customer should be eager to reach out to your sales team because the enterprise plan should offer better value than off-the-rack options at high scale.
Considering the way they presented what was obviously them trying to skirt the rules, it isn't hard to believe that CF did provide that info, and it just wasn't presented in this writeup.
Not that I have any love for CF, just saying this is a case of no one being trustworthy.
Meh - I'm pretty sure Torvalds is just saying in public what thousands of other people were thinking quietly.
It sure is unpleasant to have your mistakes pointed out in public... but it's a hell of a lot better than not even knowing you made a mistake at all which is usually what happens.
It would be better if Torvalds told the guy he's an idiot in a private email but I'm not going to get worked up over that. Honestly I have a bigger problem with The Register making a headline out of it. The kernel mailing list is relatively private... this article is going to be attached to this poor engineer for the rest of his career. They should have omitted his name at least.
Or on Linux systems as well. Another reason why Open Source / Libre Software is not only important, but essential to keep the freedom of users intact. There is no tracking, no artificial limitation from Oracle and no cost involved as well.
The Java implementation from Oracle needs to die. Everyone should switch to openjdk or stop using Java.
What are you looking to actually do with your programming skills? That will heavily influence which languages to recommend you learn. Do you want to make websites? build games? do AI stuff? Create enterprise-level software? something else?
I was expecting something more profound. Isn't this just the concept of using variables to keep code readable? Not a new concept and likely one most devs learn early on.
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