3 ms·

This sounds cool and makes me want to fiddle with it, but I can’t think of any use-cases. What kinds of things would you use this for? It can’t connect to a db,

This sounds cool and makes me want to fiddle with it, but I can’t think of any use-cases. What kinds of things would you use this for? It can’t connect to a db, except over some REST-like interface, presumably, as it’s just a vanilla v8 worker. Right? And using v8 for compute alone seems a bit of a bad fit. So I’m genuinely curious what the use-case is.

MuffinFlavored 8y ago
I wish HackerNews had a way to save comments so I could flag this and come back to it in a few days when answers are more fleshed out so I can learn. Any ideas?
- ajnin 8y ago
  Open the comment in a separate tab, come back some time later, hit F5.
  - tinus_hn 8y ago
    Or bookmark them
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  You can upvote or favorite. I use favorites a whole lot less than upvotes, which makes them more searchable. So although favorites are public (upvotes are not), I sometimes favorite a thing I would like to revisit.
zackbloom 8y ago
It breaks down into a few categories, organized by how futuristic they are: CDN extensions: People who have always wanted to be able to cache POST requests, or aggregate responses but haven't been able to do it with the limitations imposed by traditional CDNs. Workers moves what was a configuration language into a full Turing-complete programming environment which can make subrequests, interact with the Cache API directly, etc. Pushing out to the edge: There is a long list of services which are best done close to users but don't require a huge amount of state. For example, you might want to validate access tokens before requests hit your infrastructure, or do many of the other things commonly done in an API gateway. You also might want to move performance critical components of your API which don't require much state closer to users, things like aggregating and caching GraphQL or prerendering your React app. We have a Workers KV product which gives you just enough state to handle many of these cases in beta now. Serverless apps: This is what workers.dev is all about. The idea that if you _can_ deploy code to a network almost as large as the Internet itself is it possible that is a better model than deploying to a single region or availability zone? Without cold-starts you get instant scaling to almost any volume of traffic which is a big advantage, to the point where this type of serverless seems faster and cheaper even if you ignore the network. As you mention it will require better distributed storage tools, but we're optimistic those will become available in the near future. You can read more using the tag on our blog (https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/workers/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/workers/) or community forum (https://community.cloudflare.com/c/developers/workers https://community.cloudflare.com/c/developers/workers). Thanks for caring, a lot of people work on Workers every day and seeing people get invested in what we're doing is everything.

MuffinFlavored 8y ago

I wish HackerNews had a way to save comments so I could flag this and come back to it in a few days when answers are more fleshed out so I can learn. Any ideas?

ajnin 8y ago
Open the comment in a separate tab, come back some time later, hit F5.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  Or bookmark them
DoreenMichele 8y ago
You can upvote or favorite. I use favorites a whole lot less than upvotes, which makes them more searchable. So although favorites are public (upvotes are not), I sometimes favorite a thing I would like to revisit.

zackbloom 8y ago

It breaks down into a few categories, organized by how futuristic they are: CDN extensions: People who have always wanted to be able to cache POST requests, or aggregate responses but haven't been able to do it with the limitations imposed by traditional CDNs. Workers moves what was a configuration language into a full Turing-complete programming environment which can make subrequests, interact with the Cache API directly, etc. Pushing out to the edge: There is a long list of services which are best done close to users but don't require a huge amount of state. For example, you might want to validate access tokens before requests hit your infrastructure, or do many of the other things commonly done in an API gateway. You also might want to move performance critical components of your API which don't require much state closer to users, things like aggregating and caching GraphQL or prerendering your React app. We have a Workers KV product which gives you just enough state to handle many of these cases in beta now. Serverless apps: This is what workers.dev is all about. The idea that if you _can_ deploy code to a network almost as large as the Internet itself is it possible that is a better model than deploying to a single region or availability zone? Without cold-starts you get instant scaling to almost any volume of traffic which is a big advantage, to the point where this type of serverless seems faster and cheaper even if you ignore the network. As you mention it will require better distributed storage tools, but we're optimistic those will become available in the near future. You can read more using the tag on our blog (https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/workers/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/workers/) or community forum (https://community.cloudflare.com/c/developers/workers https://community.cloudflare.com/c/developers/workers). Thanks for caring, a lot of people work on Workers every day and seeing people get invested in what we're doing is everything.