5 ms·

I'm confused as to what this is. From what I can tell, it's a Lambda competitor? I 'reserved' a domain, but haven't received an email yet.

by 7ewis 8y ago

Someone1234 8y ago
Looks like a cloud based JavaScript V8 runtime (NodeJs-like?). $5 minimum/month ($0.50/million requests after the first 10 million). Here's an article[0]. Seems like an interesting service for someone, to do something... [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-workers-unleashed/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-workers-unleashed/
- zackbloom 8y ago
  One way to think about it is: why not do everything on top of a network like Workers? Does it actually make sense to deploy services to a single location when they can be trivially started up near every user?
  - cwyers 8y ago
    Since the workers are stateless, you may want to have your services closer to the data store, instead of the user.
    - zackbloom 8y ago
      More and more distributed data stores are becoming available. We (Cloudflare) have a KV [1] which can be read quickly everywhere. [1] - https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-with-workers-kv/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-with-workers-kv/
skrebbel 8y ago
Yep, it's a Lambda competitor. Basically it lets you run JS code on every request, much like Lambda. Differences: 1. It's JS but not Node.JS - You write against the service worker API and they run it in a vanilla V8. You'll want to webpack your stuff together or something like that. 2. Because it's V8 and not Node, they can run many customers in the same process (as safely as multiple sites can coexist in Chrome tabs), and therefore it's cheaper than Lambda. 3. It runs on the cloudflare edge nodes, i.e. close to the user, instead of some AWS region on the other side of the world, so latency can be lower. Can be, because for many (most?) use cases you'll still need to call some API somewhere else, eating up most latency wins you might make. They do also have a distributed KV store that might help you address this, however.
- a-robinson 8y ago
  To add on to that last point, you don't need to pick in advance which region or regions your code will run in. You push your code once, and it will run in whichever edge locations receive requests, potentially all 165+ locations if you have users sufficiently spread around the world.
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  They also let you run WebAssembly in addition to JavaScript. It’s something I’m very excited about.
  - nikkwong 8y ago
    Why would you need to run wasm in a serviceworker? I thought wasm was most practical as bytecode in a client for things like games and such.
    - steveklabnik 8y ago
      You can write non-JavaScript languages to do all the same tasks. It gives you more choice. That’s a good thing.
- xxgreg 8y ago
  > as safely as multiple sites can coexist in Chrome tabs Chrome tabs usually run in different processes. It sounds like Cloudflare is using JS isolates within the same process to run many customers. This sounds scary to me. For security, the Chrome team assumes that any code running in the same process has access to the whole address space of that process due to all of the recent speculative execution issues (Spectre/Meltdown). I've seen comments on HN say that this isn't a problem for cloudflare because they do special things with all of JS timing APIs and a few others to mitigate. Will be interesting if they are able to make this secure. Millisecond cold startup times will be amazing for development.
  - skrebbel 8y ago
    > This sounds scary to me. Well, maybe I'm wrong :-) my relationship with CloudFlare ends at me being a customer, there is a significant chance that my impression of how Workers (or its security setup) works is wrong. If you want to be sure, ask CF.

I'm confused as to what this is. From what I can tell, it's a Lambda competitor? I 'reserved' a domain, but haven't received an email yet.

by 7ewis 8y ago

I'm confused as to what this is. From what I can tell, it's a Lambda competitor? I 'reserved' a domain, but haven't received an email yet.

Someone1234 8y ago

Looks like a cloud based JavaScript V8 runtime (NodeJs-like?). $5 minimum/month ($0.50/million requests after the first 10 million). Here's an article[0]. Seems like an interesting service for someone, to do something... [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-workers-unleashed/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-workers-unleashed/

zackbloom 8y ago
One way to think about it is: why not do everything on top of a network like Workers? Does it actually make sense to deploy services to a single location when they can be trivially started up near every user?
- cwyers 8y ago
  Since the workers are stateless, you may want to have your services closer to the data store, instead of the user.
  - zackbloom 8y ago
    More and more distributed data stores are becoming available. We (Cloudflare) have a KV [1] which can be read quickly everywhere. [1] - https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-with-workers-kv/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-with-workers-kv/

skrebbel 8y ago

Yep, it's a Lambda competitor. Basically it lets you run JS code on every request, much like Lambda. Differences: 1. It's JS but not Node.JS - You write against the service worker API and they run it in a vanilla V8. You'll want to webpack your stuff together or something like that. 2. Because it's V8 and not Node, they can run many customers in the same process (as safely as multiple sites can coexist in Chrome tabs), and therefore it's cheaper than Lambda. 3. It runs on the cloudflare edge nodes, i.e. close to the user, instead of some AWS region on the other side of the world, so latency can be lower. Can be, because for many (most?) use cases you'll still need to call some API somewhere else, eating up most latency wins you might make. They do also have a distributed KV store that might help you address this, however.

a-robinson 8y ago
To add on to that last point, you don't need to pick in advance which region or regions your code will run in. You push your code once, and it will run in whichever edge locations receive requests, potentially all 165+ locations if you have users sufficiently spread around the world.
steveklabnik 8y ago
They also let you run WebAssembly in addition to JavaScript. It’s something I’m very excited about.
- nikkwong 8y ago
  Why would you need to run wasm in a serviceworker? I thought wasm was most practical as bytecode in a client for things like games and such.
  - steveklabnik 8y ago
    You can write non-JavaScript languages to do all the same tasks. It gives you more choice. That’s a good thing.
xxgreg 8y ago
> as safely as multiple sites can coexist in Chrome tabs Chrome tabs usually run in different processes. It sounds like Cloudflare is using JS isolates within the same process to run many customers. This sounds scary to me. For security, the Chrome team assumes that any code running in the same process has access to the whole address space of that process due to all of the recent speculative execution issues (Spectre/Meltdown). I've seen comments on HN say that this isn't a problem for cloudflare because they do special things with all of JS timing APIs and a few others to mitigate. Will be interesting if they are able to make this secure. Millisecond cold startup times will be amazing for development.
- skrebbel 8y ago
  > This sounds scary to me. Well, maybe I'm wrong :-) my relationship with CloudFlare ends at me being a customer, there is a significant chance that my impression of how Workers (or its security setup) works is wrong. If you want to be sure, ask CF.