7 ms·
Workers Cache
- davidmurdoch 3mo agoThe feature is great. The post itself is a slop grenade.
- CodesInChaos 3mo agoModern cloudflare in a nutshell.
- dan_sbl 3mo agoBillion dollar company can't afford one human copywriter. The future is great! (edit: copyrighter -> copywriter)
- davidmurdoch 3mo agoThey could just feed an llm a small corpus of past human authored posts from their site, and have the LLM rewrite it in a style matching style, and it would likely turn out pretty great.
- jgrahamc 3mo agoI've tried this with my own blog posts from blog.jgc.org and the result was... not good. It basically wrote something that read like a parody.
- davidmurdoch 3mo agoAh, bummer. Not totally surprising though.
- ButlerianJihad 3mo agoNeither can you afford a copywriter, evidently?
- lijok 3mo agoCan you elaborate? I read it, found the concepts well explained, walked away better informed. Responding to alleged slop with more slop doesn’t decrease the total amount of slop on the internet.
- davidmurdoch 3mo agoYou think I'm using AI to leave comments like this on HN?
- skrebbel 3mo ago"slop" doesn't mean "AI generated content", it means bad content, a waste of the reader's time. Grantparent's implication is that your comment was bad content, not that it was AI generated bad content.
- davidmurdoch 3mo agoI was riffing off of the meaning from https://noslopgrenade.com/ https://noslopgrenade.com/ which made its way around the comments here on HN a few weeks ago.
- skrebbel 3mo agoAh, fair
- geraneum 3mo agoNot the original commenter; but, at least for me, the idea is that when it’s written by humans we know that effort and care were put into communicating the news. Otherwise they could post a link to the docs and we could ask my flavor of LLM to summerize. No need for extra filler content. That why it’s slop and it’s different.
- lijok 3mo agoI don’t have access to my flavor of LLM on the train nor the time or budget to have it do the research and summary for me Why are we all of a sudden pretending like pre-LLM era blogs were these pristinely well written pieces of art or even that effort and care was put into them? In most cases they were significantly less coherent and incomplete. Don’t get me started on the mess that was the communication of this particular company or one of their competitors like AWS.
- napsterbr 3mo agoOne of the recent AI tells other than em dash is the excessive usage of hyphenated words: > multi-tenant-safe cache keys > on a server-rendered app > byte-for-byte identical (classic) > gets a cache-speed response > cached-file-extensions list Honestly, this is terrible. I had to add a "use simple words only, don't hyphenate unnecessarily" warning to my Claude config. After a full day of work, having to read these Claudisms all the time make a noticeable difference on how tired you get. It gets even worse when Claude starts to make up its own vocabulary.
- arikrahman 3mo agoOne of the earliest tells was the use of emdashes.
- topgrain2 3mo agoFuck, I spent all these years developing a thoughtful writing style that leaned toward clarity for the reader, even if it meant extra work to achieve precision, or adding affordances like “excessive” hyphenation, and now I guess have to learn to write worse.
- napsterbr 3mo agoThere is a world of difference between well-written human text and sloppy walls of AI-generated text. There's nothing wrong in using hyphenations or emdashes -- I use them myself! That's not the point of my comment.
- ignoramous 3mo agoWhat does it mean when prompting SoTA LLMs prone to slop to be concise and precise, with respect to context at hand, not work at all? Anyone benchmarking that?
- Xirdus 3mo agoWhether we like it or not, em dashes are effectively verboten in online discussions and blog posts if you want people to take you seriously. If the idea that excessive hyphenation is an AI tell gains traction, it too will become impossible to use without ruining your credibility.
- thinkafterbef 3mo agoFinally proper stale-while-revalidate support!
- dbbk 3mo agoThat landed a few months ago
- adasq 3mo agonow, waiting for opennext adapter maintainers to catchup with it
- brendanib 3mo agouse vinext! (now 1.0 beta) https://vinext.dev/ https://vinext.dev/ https://x.com/James_Elicx/status/2073457440461303836 https://x.com/James_Elicx/status/2073457440461303836 it already uses Workers Cache for the route-level ISR cache
- ricardobeat 3mo ago[dead]
- ignoramous 3mo agoWhen Workers Cache is enabled, every cacheable request to your Worker hits Cloudflare's cache first. If there's a fresh cached response, Cloudflare returns it directly — your Worker doesn't run, and you don't pay CPU time for it. On a miss, your Worker runs, and if your response is cacheable, Cloudflare stores it for the next request. The next request from anywhere on Earth can be served straight from cache. Incredible! This is why I shoehorn all my server side usecases on to the Workers Platform. Cloudflare, since 2020 when I first went all-in, has consistently shipped features that reduce bills significantly (except for 2023 Workers usage model changes). In one case, when they shipped free Snippets (Workers but 32kb code size & 5s CPU time) for Pro accounts ($200/yr), our bills went from £15k+ to £0. I know about the infamous "Enterprise plan" (especially, when your bandwidth is as high as ours in 100s of TBs) and know of at least one other tech shop that was required to pay for it ... but we haven't got that sales call, yet.
- PUSH_AX 3mo agoOur bandwidth is very high, we constantly get invited onto the call with their team, but after talking with them a few times it makes absolutely zero sense for us to have a committed spend, all the stuff I needed an account manager for in GCP/AWS just doesn't exist in CF. Support wise I imagine if it's broken for us it's also broken for 2 million other people so... yeah... Thanks CF!
- htsh 3mo agocurious, how does one configure something like this for AWS Lambda? Appreciate it. I am assuming it is a bunch of manual work.
- lekevicius 3mo agoAmazing, exactly what Workers lacked, I was quite annoyed that a worker would spin up when 99% of my requests then return a cache. Waste of 3ms, times millions.
- dangoodmanUT 3mo agofinally, this was needed. A big worry was always "why does workers sit in front of my cache? that's a waste of an invocation if i'm returning a cached result"
- vlucas 3mo agoHuge props to just sticking with the HTTP spec on this one with `Cache-Control` headers with `stale-while-revalidate` support. It's amazing how many other providers mess that up. On top of that the cache tags are a slick way to do invalidation. This looks like a great product.
- mchav 3mo agoGreat feature. Although I’m starting to get annoyed by obvious signs of LLM writing like no X, no Y etc.
- xpct 3mo agoPeople that don't like writing now get to write by offloading it to an LLM, and this is the result. I miss the world where articles were mostly written by people who had the interest and patience to do it.
- 383toast 3mo agoAt least for me I don't really read these posts/docs, I just give the link to claude and it'll implement it regardless of wording
- pythonaut_16 3mo agoIs this a bot or LLM reply? Because you've given this exact comment word for word at least twice in this thread...
- hdz 3mo agoDoes anything beat a free static site hosted with Cloudflare workers at this point, performance wise?
- nicce 3mo agoVery difficult to beat if you don't process or store private information that should not be given to the US company.
- NSUserDefaults 3mo agoReinventing the web, one service at a time. Is it really that hard to build things like this on a per-case base, small scale, all on a bare bones VPS? Do we need a global gateway to help us not screw up the basics? Service looks nice but makes me sad somehow.
- jesse_dot_id 3mo agoAs a DevOps engineer, if you learn to implement CF Workers with Claude Code's Cloudflare skill, you will no longer be burdened by this question. I'm running a Docker swarm on my homelab, a Docker swarm on a EC2 instance, but there's no longer a single web service in either of them. Workers is insanely good.
- simonw 3mo ago> This is the caching API we've always wanted Workers to have. Here's why it took us this long I was looking forward to the "why it took us this long" explanation but it wasn't explicitly spelled out. Any Cloudflare staff here able to expand on that? (The article does a good job of showing how many different smart design decisions went into this, but given caching is core to what a Cloudflare does I'm still a little surprised it took 9 years to get here!)
- tshaddox 3mo agoThe article was very clearly written or heavily edited by AI, which I suspect explains some of the peculiarities in structure and wording.
- kentonv 3mo agoThe honest answer is: We implemented the "standard" Cache API back in the early days because it was a standard, one which was intended to be used together with the Service Workers API, which we were also building around back then. But it was never a good fit. The get/put API was designed for a local browser cache, not a distributed cache like Cloudflare's. We probably should have realized this before implementing it, but it really became obvious over the years of actual use. But given we had something that mostly worked for most use cases, it was hard to prioritize redoing it against all the other things on our plate. So we deferred. More recently, architectural changes we've been making in Workers for other reasons happened to make it significantly easier to finally implement this the way we wanted, and we were able to find some engineering time to get it over the line. Gory details for the curious: We've been improving the infrastructure around the notion of workers having multiple "entrypoints", with the ability to parameterize those entrypoints. ctx.props[0] and ctx.exports[1] are part of this. A lot of this was motivated by Dynamic Workers sandboxing, but the concept also presents a clean way to inject a cache between two parts of the same worker, by applying it to the entrypoint and having the worker call itself using ctx.exports. Moreover, the introduction of "channel tokens" made a big difference[2][3]. Essentially I created a way to encode a token (bytes) representing an arbitrary entrypoint to a Worker, complete with its serialized parameters. I did this to enable these entrypoint stubs to be passed over RPC, which is again useful for sandboxing use cases, but it also created a convenient, encapsulated way to pass information through our cache infrastructure about what worker should run at the other end. It's not a huge breakthrough or anything, but I think it made the architecture clearer in everyone's mind to the point that we got excited about using it to implement caching properly, finally. [0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/context/#props https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/conte... [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/context/#exports https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/conte... [2] https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/blob/main/src/workerd/io/io-channels.h#L213 https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/blob/main/src/workerd/... [3] https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/blob/main/src/workerd/server/channel-token.capnp https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/blob/main/src/workerd/...
- jasoncartwright 3mo agoThe previous Worker in-front of the cache never made sense to my old school proxy in-front of the appserver mindset. Already using this to speed up a tool. Nice work.
- dbbk 3mo agoCloudflare Snippets were actually better if you wanted to run logic before the cache (they are entirely free)
- drdexebtjl 3mo agoIt makes sense in a world where Cloudflare is something that runs in front of your app. You need to run some arbitrary code before their logic, including their cache. If you wanted something that ran after the cache, you could put it in your app, you didn’t need the worker. That was Cloudflare when Workers launched. But now the platform has evolved to where you’re running the entire app from Workers.
- danabramov 3mo agoPlease please please write your own blogposts. I already read “but here’s the biggest unlock, and it’s the part that’s hardest to see” all day. I just don’t understand why undermine your own announcements by delegating comms to the machine. It’s disrespectful to the reader.
- rob 3mo agoThere has to be some sort of "/humanize-text" skill they can pass the output to before publishing.
- danabramov 3mo agoThere is this one! Though I have not tested it. https://github.com/stephenturner/skill-deslop https://github.com/stephenturner/skill-deslop I found it funny to just read through.
- 383toast 3mo agoAt least for me I don't really read these posts/docs, I just give the link to claude and it'll implement it regardless of wording
- jesse_dot_id 3mo agoThis is also 100% what I just did. In fact, I think companies should be releasing a human readable format as well as a machine readable format.
- pizzafeelsright 3mo agoMachine readable: the text, font, media, formatting, is all machine readable. I think you are looking is the signal separated from the noise. I read technical documents very quickly while having very high retention and comprehension. The AI slop and AI content generation is pushing my limits. 'AI summarization' is what I naturally or learned to do growing up. I read your request as 'human readable format' being something more conversational or perhaps with known intent: inform the human. It is not possible. Socratic method is the better path to learning. AI can make it easier. Suggestion: AI, summarize and then ask me questions about this topic in increasingly more difficult questions, and after passing the depth of this document push further into the deeper fundamentals and first principals of the topic.
- TimCTRL 3mo agoi just love the sweet $0 invoice at the end of each month for all these services. Thanks CF.
- dbbk 3mo agoI was a bit confused what this adds other than just standard CDN-Cache-Control page caching that we do now. Some quirks I've found; - You still get billed per request, whether the request hits cache or not (but don't get billed for CPU time) - You now get billed for static asset requests! This makes no sense to me. "One thing to watch: when caching is enabled, requests that are normally free — static asset requests and worker-to-worker invocations through service bindings or ctx.exports — are billed at the standard request rate, because each one now consults the cache in front of your Worker." Yeah that sounds like a bug that just happens to generate them more money. - The cache key automatically has the worker deployment version, so even gradual deployments populate their own cache which is nice - It seems like you can set a totally custom cache key? But that was previously Enterprise only, can't see if that's still the case here.
- ascorbic 3mo ago> I was a bit confused what this adds other than just standard CDN-Cache-Control page caching that we do now. Until now these cache headers didn't work if you set them in a Worker, because Workers were always run in front of the cache. You could use them if you're running Cloudflare cache in front of another origin, but not if you were e.g. rendering a site in Workers. This changes that.
- drdexebtjl 3mo ago> Yeah that sounds like a bug that just happens to generate them more money. Yeah. It sounds like they moved the component that counts requests earlier in the pipeline so that it can count cache hits, and now it also counts these.
- sidcool 3mo agoCPU time is not billed
- dbbk 3mo agoI said that
- drdexebtjl 3mo agoFinally :) Time to migrate rarely-updating websites that still need a CMS to Cloudflare. > One thing to watch: when caching is enabled, requests that are normally free — static asset requests and worker-to-worker invocations through service bindings or ctx.exports — are billed at the standard request rate, because each one now consults the cache in front of your Worker. That’s a very weird limitation from a product standpoint. You might end up spending more money by enabling caching. I wonder if static assets and worker-to-worker invocations are really more expensive to them with caching enabled, or if this is just a metering problem. I would have made this free in the interest of making billing simpler and of making the decision to enable caching more straightforward. If you’re min-maxing costs, this encourages awkward setups where you split workers into two, one with caching enabled and one with caching disabled.
- peter_retief 3mo agoCould this apply to workers that ingest email?