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Recapping Developer Week

05/22/2023

6 min read

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Recapping Developer Week

Developer Week 2023 is officially a wrap. Last week, we shipped 34 posts highlighting what has been going on with our developer platform and where we’re headed in the future – including new products & features, in-depth tutorials to help you get started, and customer stories to inspire you.

We’ve loved already hearing feedback from you all about what we’ve shipped:

We hope you’re able to spend the coming weeks slinging some code and experimenting with some of the new tools we shipped last week. As you’re building, join us in our developers discord and let us know what you think.

In case you missed any of our announcements here’s a handy recap:

AI announcements

Announcement Summary
Batteries included: how AI will transform the who and how of programming The emergence of large language models (LLMs) is going to change the way developers write, debug, and modify code. Developer Platforms need to evolve to integrate AI capabilities to assist developers in their journeys.
Introducing Constellation, bringing AI to the Cloudflare stack Run pre-trained machine learning models and inference tasks on Cloudflare’s global network with Constellation AI. We’ll maintain a catalog of verified and ready-to-use models, or you can upload and train your own.
Introducing Cursor: the Cloudflare AI Assistant When getting started with a new technology comes a lot of questions on how to get started. Finding answers quickly is a time-saver. To help developers build in the fastest way possible we’ve introduced Cursor, an experimental AI assistant, to answer questions you may have about the Developer Platform. The assistant responds with both text and relevant links to our documentation to help you go further.
Query Cloudflare Radar and our docs using ChatGPT plugins ChatGPT, recently allowed the ability for developers to create custom extensions to make ChatGPT even more powerful. It’s now possible to provide guidance to the conversational workflows within ChatGPT such as up-to-date statistics and product information. We’ve published plugins for Radar and our Developer Documentation and a tutorial showing how you can build your own plugin using Workers.
A complete suite of Zero Trust security tools to help get the most from AI With any new technology comes concerns about risk and AI is no different. If you want to build with AI and maintain a Zero Trust security posture, Cloudflare One offers a collection of features to build with AI without increased risk. We’ve also compiled some best practices around securing your LLM.
Cloudflare R2 and MosaicML enable training LLMs on any compute, anywhere in the world, with zero switching costs Training large language models requires massive amount of compute which has led AI companies to look at multi-cloud architectures, with R2 and MosaicML companies can build these infrastructures at a fraction of the cost.
The S3 to R2 Super Slurper is now Generally Available After partnering with hundreds of early adopters to migrate objects to R2 during the beta, the Super Slurper is now generally available.
A raft of Cloudflare services for AI startups AI startups no longer need affiliation with an accelerator or an employee referral to gain access to the Startup Program. Bootstrapped AI startups can apply today to get free access to Cloudflare services including R2, Workers, Pages, and a host of other security and developer services.
How to secure Generative AI applications 11 tips for securing your generative AI application.
Using LangChain JS and Cloudflare Workers together A tutorial on building your first LangChainJS and Workers application to build more sophisticated applications by switching between LLMs or chaining prompts together.

Data announcements

Announcement Summary
Announcing database integrations: a few clicks to connect to Neon, PlanetScale, and Supabase on Workers We’ve partnered with other database providers, including Neon, PlanetScale, and Supabase, to make authenticating and connecting back to your databases there just work, without having to copy-paste credentials and connection strings back and forth.
Announcing connect() - a new API for creating TCP sockets from Cloudflare Workers Connect back to existing PostgreSQL and MySQL databases directly from Workers with outbound TCP sockets allowing you to connect to any database when building with Workers.
D1: We turned it up to 11 D1 is now not only significantly faster, but has a raft of new features, including the ability to time travel: restore your database to any minute within the last 30 days, without having to make a manual backup.
Smart Placement speed up applications by moving code close to your backend - no config needed Bringing compute closer to the end user isn’t always the right answer to improve performance. Smart Placement for Workers and Pages Functions moves compute to the optimal location whether that is closer to the end user or closer to backend services and data.
Use Snowflake with R2 to extend your global data lake Get valuable insights from your data when you use Snowflake to query data stored in your R2 data lake and load data from R2 into Snowflake’s Data Cloud.
Developer Week Performance Update: Spotlight on R2 Retrieving objects from storage needs to be fast. R2 is 20-40% faster than Amazon S3 when serving media content via public access.

Developer experience announcements

Announcement Summary
Making Cloudflare the best place for your web applications Create Cloudflare CLI (C3) is a companion CLI to Wrangler giving you a single entry-point to configure Cloudflare via CLI. Pick your framework, all npm dependencies are installed, and you’ll receive a URL for where your application was deployed.
A whole new Quick Edit in Cloudflare Workers QuickEdit for Workers powered by VSCode giving you a familiar environment to edit Workers directly in the dash.
Bringing a unified developer experience to Cloudflare Workers and Pages Manage all your Workers scripts and Pages projects from a single place in the Cloudflare dashboard. Over the next year we’ll be working to converge these two separate experiences into one eliminating friction when building.
Modernizing the toolbox for Cloudflare Pages builds Now in beta, the build system for Pages includes the latest versions of Node.js, Python, Hugo, and more. You can opt in to use this for existing projects or stay on the existing system, so your builds won’t break.
Improved local development with Wrangler and workerd Having a local development environment that mimics production as closely as possible helps to ensure everything runs as expected in production. You can test every aspect prior to deployment. Wrangler 3 now leverages Miniflare3 based on workerd with local-by-default development.
Goodbye, section 2.8 and hello to Cloudflare’s new terms of service Our terms of service were not clear about serving content hosted on the Developer Platform via our CDN. We’ve made it clearer that customers can use the CDN to serve video and other large files stored on the Developer Platform including Images, Pages, R2, and Stream.
More Node.js APIs in Cloudflare Workers-Streams, Pat, StringDecoder We’ve expanded support Node.js APIs to increase compatibility with the existing ecosystem of open source npm packages.

But wait, there’s more

Announcement Summary
How Cloudflare is powering the next generation of platforms with Workers A retrospective on the first year of Workers for Platform, what’s coming next, and featuring how customers like Shopify and Grafbase are building with it.
Building Cloudflare on Cloudflare A technical deep dive into how we are rearchitecting internal services to use Workers.
Announcing Cloudflare Secrets Store A centralized repository to store sensitive data for use across all of Cloudflare’s products.
Cloudflare Queues: messages at your speed with consumer concurrency and explicit acknowledgement Announcing new features for Queues to ensure queues don’t fall behind, and processing time doesn’t slow down.
Workers Browser Rendering API enters open beta Deploy a Worker script that requires Browser Rendering capabilities through Wrangler.

Watch on Cloudflare TV

If you missed any of the announcements or want to also view the associated Cloudflare TV segments, where blog authors went through each announcement, you can now watch all the Developer Week videos on Cloudflare TV.

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Ricky Robinett|@rickyrobinett
Dawn Parzych|@dparzych
Cloudflare|@cloudflare

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