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CF Workers seem to slowly becoming a full-blown "edge" platform. A year or two ago you couldn't really use it for much except simple cloud functions and key-val

CF Workers seem to slowly becoming a full-blown "edge" platform. A year or two ago you couldn't really use it for much except simple cloud functions and key-value storage, but now, with WS support, S3 storage and SQL database coming along I'll be taking a second look.

xwdv 3y ago
Not sure why this is a surprise to people, AWS started with similar humble origins. The goal of Cloudflare has been to become the fourth public cloud for a long time now, I think in several years they will be the most powerful platform to build on.
- arek_nawo 3y ago
  Not really a surprise, and the platform will very likely grow further, though I wouldn't compare CF to AWS in anything except the rise in popularity. I'd say they're "reinventing" cloud in a way. From my point of view, AWS is (mostly) IaaS, likes of Heroku - PaaS, whereas CF Workers and their "ecosystem" is primarly serverless, though - with these recent additions - they're expanding what this category of tools can do. It's a unique platform for sure.
  - xwdv 3y ago
    Yes it will be better than AWS.
  - eropple 3y ago
    I used to work at Render, and I said often "Cloudflare is the iceberg - only ten percent of it is above the water and it's going to tear a big chunk out of the [PaaS] boat". Over time it seems more and more confirmable as a hypothesis.
    - arek_nawo 3y ago
      True. I was actually looking at Render a while back to host my app. The Render Disks were the one feature I was most interested in, as no other PaaS provider I was aware of provided persistent disk storage. The prices were a bit too much for a side-project though, and with no managed MongoDB, I ultimately made the app not require the disk storage and moved to Railway.
  - fzeindl 3y ago
    The question is how the smart people at AWS who realized this too, will prevent them from rising to the top.
fzeindl 3y ago
And they are building it so architecturally clean that switching clouds becomes easier.
- arek_nawo 3y ago
  Clean - yes. Working with CF Workers was (and I think still is) a joy. However, I'm curious if, with this many features that are mostly unique to CF, will there be a feeling of vendor lock-in when developing more complex apps? Serverless functions can be usually moved back and forth pretty easily, but if you become dependent on CF-specific features how hard will it be to migrate if there comes a need to?
  - fzeindl 3y ago
    That is exactly my thought. As long as the APIs remain clean: SQL for D1, simple KV-store for KV etc with clear semantics, it will be agnostic. Especially since caching sits at the core.
  - kentonv 3y ago
    Note that although there is unfortunately no complete standard that we could follow for `connect()`, the API is largely based on the JavaScript streams standard. `connect()` itself returns a ReadableStream and a WritableStream representing the two sides of the socket -- both standard APIs that are widely implemented by browsers and others. Hopefully, this means that it doesn't take much to adapt code to any other API that another vendor might provide.
bushbaba 3y ago
Smart as they no longer need to build every feature customers need at the edge. Instead customers can build the cdn stack that fits their needs.
threatofrain 3y ago
What is the use case of WS with short-lived functions? That's been one of my main hesitations in exploring serverless functions.
- rob-olmos 3y ago
  WS = WebSocket? I think integrating with the Discord API would've been one use case until they added the slash commands & webhooks. But looks like Discord Gateway blocks CF Workers: https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs/issues/6145#issuecomment-1546062971 https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs/issues/6145#issu...

xwdv 3y ago

Not sure why this is a surprise to people, AWS started with similar humble origins. The goal of Cloudflare has been to become the fourth public cloud for a long time now, I think in several years they will be the most powerful platform to build on.

arek_nawo 3y ago
Not really a surprise, and the platform will very likely grow further, though I wouldn't compare CF to AWS in anything except the rise in popularity. I'd say they're "reinventing" cloud in a way. From my point of view, AWS is (mostly) IaaS, likes of Heroku - PaaS, whereas CF Workers and their "ecosystem" is primarly serverless, though - with these recent additions - they're expanding what this category of tools can do. It's a unique platform for sure.
- xwdv 3y ago
  Yes it will be better than AWS.
- eropple 3y ago
  I used to work at Render, and I said often "Cloudflare is the iceberg - only ten percent of it is above the water and it's going to tear a big chunk out of the [PaaS] boat". Over time it seems more and more confirmable as a hypothesis.
  - arek_nawo 3y ago
    True. I was actually looking at Render a while back to host my app. The Render Disks were the one feature I was most interested in, as no other PaaS provider I was aware of provided persistent disk storage. The prices were a bit too much for a side-project though, and with no managed MongoDB, I ultimately made the app not require the disk storage and moved to Railway.
- fzeindl 3y ago
  The question is how the smart people at AWS who realized this too, will prevent them from rising to the top.

fzeindl 3y ago

And they are building it so architecturally clean that switching clouds becomes easier.

arek_nawo 3y ago
Clean - yes. Working with CF Workers was (and I think still is) a joy. However, I'm curious if, with this many features that are mostly unique to CF, will there be a feeling of vendor lock-in when developing more complex apps? Serverless functions can be usually moved back and forth pretty easily, but if you become dependent on CF-specific features how hard will it be to migrate if there comes a need to?
- fzeindl 3y ago
  That is exactly my thought. As long as the APIs remain clean: SQL for D1, simple KV-store for KV etc with clear semantics, it will be agnostic. Especially since caching sits at the core.
- kentonv 3y ago
  Note that although there is unfortunately no complete standard that we could follow for `connect()`, the API is largely based on the JavaScript streams standard. `connect()` itself returns a ReadableStream and a WritableStream representing the two sides of the socket -- both standard APIs that are widely implemented by browsers and others. Hopefully, this means that it doesn't take much to adapt code to any other API that another vendor might provide.

bushbaba 3y ago

Smart as they no longer need to build every feature customers need at the edge. Instead customers can build the cdn stack that fits their needs.

threatofrain 3y ago

What is the use case of WS with short-lived functions? That's been one of my main hesitations in exploring serverless functions.

rob-olmos 3y ago
WS = WebSocket? I think integrating with the Discord API would've been one use case until they added the slash commands & webhooks. But looks like Discord Gateway blocks CF Workers: https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs/issues/6145#issuecomment-1546062971 https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs/issues/6145#issu...