Hey web developers! We are about to shake things up a bit here at Cloudflare and wanted to give you a heads-up, so that you know what we are doing and where we are going. You might know Cloudflare as one of the best places to come to when you need to protect, speed up, or scale your web application, but increasingly Cloudflare is also becoming the best place to deploy and run your application!
Why deploy your application to Cloudflare? Two simple reasons. First, it removes lots of hassle of managing many separate systems and allows you to develop, deploy, monitor, and tune your application all in one place. Second, by deploying to Cloudflare directly, there is so much more we can do to optimize your application and get it to the hands, ears, or eyes of your users more quickly and smoothly.
So what’s changing? Quite a bit, actually. I’m not going to bore you with rehashing all the details as my most-awesome colleagues have written separate blog posts with all the details, but here is a high level rundown.
Cloudflare Workers + Pages = awesome development platform
Cloudflare Pages and Workers are merging into a single unified development and application hosting platform that offers:
Super low latency globally: your static assets and compute are less than 50ms away from 95% of the world’s Internet-connected population.
Free egress including free static asset hosting.
Standards-based JavaScript and WASM runtime that already serves over 10 million requests per second at peak globally.
Access to powerful features like R2 (object storage with an S3-compatible API), low-latency globally replicated KV storage, Queues, D1 database, and many more.
Support for GitOps and CI/CD workflows and preview environments to boost development velocity.
… and so much more.
While mathematically proven to be wrong, we stubbornly believe that 1+1=3, and in this case this translates to Cloudflare Pages + Workers = way more than the sum of the parts. In fact, it’s an awesome foundation for one of a kind development platform that we are thrilled to be building for you.
We started this product convergence journey a few quarters ago, and early on agreed upon not leaving any of the existing applications behind. Instead, we’ll be bringing them over to this new world. Today we are ready to start sharing the incremental results, with so much more to come over the upcoming quarters. Want to know more? My colleague Nevi posted lots of spicy details in her blog post.
Smart Placement for Workers takes us beyond the edge!
Smart placement is, to put it simply, revolutionary for Cloudflare. It enables a new compute paradigm on our platform, unmatched by any other application hosting providers today. Do you have a typical full-stack application built with one of the many popular web frameworks? This feature is for you! And it works with both Workers and Pages!
While previously we always executed all applications at the “edge” of our global network — meaning, as close to the user as possible. With smart placement, we intelligently determine the best location within our network where the compute (your application) should run. We do this by observing your application’s behavior and what other network resources or endpoints the application interacts with. We then transparently spawn your application at an optimal location, usually close to where your data is stored, and route the incoming requests via our network to this location.
Smart placement enables applications to run near to the data these applications need to get stuff done. This is especially powerful for applications that interact with databases, object stores, or other backend endpoints, especially if these are centralized and not globally distributed.
Your user or clients requests still enter our lightning fast network in one of our 285+ datacenters in the world, close to their current location, but instead of spawning the application right there, we route the request to the most optimal datacenter, the one that is near the data or backend system the application talks to.
This doesn’t mean that compute at the edge is not cool anymore! It is! There are still many use-cases where running your application at the edge makes sense, and smart placement will determine this scenario and keep the application at the edge if that’s the right place for it to be. A/B testing, localization, asset serving, and others are use-cases that should almost always happen at the edge.
Sounds interesting? Check out this visual demo and read up on Smart Placement in a blog post from my colleague Tanushree to get started.
Develop locally or in the browser!
We continue to deliver on our goal to build the best development environment integrated directly into our lightning fast and globally distributed application platform. We’re launching Wrangler v3, with complete support for local-by-default development workflow. Powered by the open-source Cloudflare Workers JavaScript runtime — workerd, this change reduces development server startup time by 10x and script reload times by 60x — boosting your productivity and keeping you in the flow longer.
In the dashboard, we're introducing an upgraded and far more powerful online editor powered by VSCode – you can now finally edit multiple JavaScript modules in your browser, get an accurate edge preview of your code, friendly error pages, and type checking!
Finally, in both our dashboard editor and Wrangler, we've updated our workerd-customized Chrome DevTools to the latest version, providing even greater debugging and profiling capabilities, wherever you choose to work.
This is just the first wave of improvements to our development tooling space, you’ll see us iterating in this space over the next few quarters, but in the meantime, check out in-depth posts from Adam, Brendan, and Samuel with all the Wrangler v3 details and VSCode and dash editor improvements.
Increased memory, CPU, and application size limits and simplified pricing!
In the age of AI, WASM, and powerful full-stack applications, we’ve noticed that developers are hitting our current resource limits with increased frequency. We want to be a place where these applications thrive and developers are empowered to build bigger and more sophisticated applications. Therefore, within the next week we’ll be increasing application size limits (JavaScript/WASM bundle size) to 10MB (after gzip) and startup latency limit (script compile time) is being increased from 200ms to 400ms.
To further empower developers, we’re thinking about how to unify and simplify our billing model to make our pricing more straightforward, and increase limits such as memory limits by introducing tiers. Stay tuned for more information on these!
With these changes developers can build cooler apps and operate them for less! Cool, right?!?
Pages CI now with a modern build image!
The wait is finally over! Pages now use a modern build image to power the CI and integrated build system. With this improvement you can finally use recent versions of Node.js, pnpm, and many other tools used by developers today.
While delivering this improvement, we made it much easier for us to keep things up to date in the future, but also unlocked new features like build caching!
The updates are available to all new projects by default, while existing projects can opt in to newer defaults. Sounds like your cup of coffee? Read on in this blog post by Greg.
Enough already, let’s get started! …with your framework of choice and C3!
In addition to being a CDN, and place to deploy your Worker applications, Cloudflare is now also becoming the best place to run your full-stack web applications. This includes all full-stack web frameworks like Angular, Astro, Next, Nuxt, Qwik, Remix, Solid, Svelte, Vue, and others.
Our overall mission is to help build a better Internet, and my team’s contribution to this mission is to enable developers, but really just about anyone, to go from an idea to a deployed application in no time.
To enable developers to turn their ideas into deployed applications quickly and without any hassle we’ve built two things.
First, we partnered with many web framework authors to build new or improve existing adapters for all the popular JavaScript web frameworks. These adapters ensure that your application runs on our platform in the most efficient way, while having access to all the capabilities and features of our platform.
These adapters include the highly requested Next.js adapter, that we’ve just overhauled to be production ready and are launching 1.0.0 today! In partnership with the respective teams, we’ve built brand-new adapters for Angular, and Qwik, while improving Astro, Nuxt, Solid, and a few others.
Second, we developed a brand new sassy CLI we call C3 — short for create-cloudflare CLI, a sibling to our existing Wrangler CLI. If you are a developer who lives your life in terminal or local editors like VSCode, then this CLI is your single entry-point to the Cloudflare universe.
Run the C3 command, and we’ll get you started. You pick your framework of choice, we hand the control over to the CLI of the chosen framework as we don’t want to stand in between you and the hard-working framework authors that craft the experience for their framework. A minute or so later once all npm dependencies are installed, you get a URL from us with your application deployed. That’s it. From an idea to a URL that you can share with friends almost instantly! Boom.
The best place for your web applications
So to recap, our first class support for full-stack web frameworks, combined with the low latency and cost-effectiveness of our platform, as well as smart placement that allows the backend of the full-stack web application to run in the optimal location automagically, and all the remaining significant improvements in our developer tooling, makes Cloudflare THE best place to build and host web applications. This is our contribution to our mission to build a better Internet and push the Web forward.
We aspire to be the place people turn to when they want to get business done, or when they just want to be creative, explore ideas and have fun. It’s a long journey, and we’ve got a lot of interesting challenges ahead of us. Your input will be critical in guiding us. We are all thrilled to have the opportunity to be part of it and give it our best shot. You can join this journey too, and get started today:
npm create cloudflare my-first-app