Runtimes, serverless, edge compute, containers, virtual machines, functions, pods, virtualenv. All names for things developers need to go from writing code to running code. It’s a painful reality that for most developers going from code they’ve written to code that actually runs can be hard.
Excruciatingly, software development is made hard by dependencies on modules, by scaling, by security, by cost, by availability, by deployment, by builds, and on and on. All the ugly reality of crystallizing thoughts into lines of code that actually run, successfully, somewhere, more than once, non-stop, and at scale.
And so… Welcome to Developer Week 2021!
Like we have done in previous Innovation Weeks (such as Security Week or Privacy Week), we will be making many (about 20) announcements of products and features to make developers’ lives easier. And by easy I mean removing the obstacles that stop you, dear developer, from writing code and deploying it so it scales to Internet size.
And Cloudflare Workers, our platform for software developers who want to deploy Internet-facing applications that start instantly and scale Internetly, has been around since 2017 (or to put it in perspective, since iPhone 8) and helping developers code and deploy in seconds all along. In reality, Cloudflare has been “for developers” from the beginning with powerful APIs and customer “edge side code” that was restricted to our enterprise customers.
Real world requirements from our users have driven us to constantly enhance our platform. We’ve added storage with Workers KV, a unique and powerful storage and compute combination called Durable Objects. Workers Unbound for long running tasks. Workers Triggers for programs triggered by things other than HTTP requests. Our slick command-line tool, wrangler, for deployment and logging. And support for many, many languages.
Time flies and almost four years since we announced Workers it’s time to deepen and broaden the platform so that developers make it the go-to place for application development on the Internet. This week’s announcements enhance Workers but go beyond it to round out solutions that make building real world services and websites easy.
In the next seven days expect to see products that were in beta become generally available and production ready, a new product to make building a SaaS application (even one with vanity domains) one-click easy, tools to make intelligent applications, more storage options, new partnerships, improved pricing, observability, easier ways to expose an application (or localhost) to the Internet, and more. A whole stream of announcements with associated broadcasts on Cloudflare TV. Oh, and a confluence of the browser, Zero Trust and the command-line that’ll make you go “wow!”
Ssh!
That’s all coming over the next seven days. It’s hard to contain myself, but I can’t say more about the details.
So, sit back and get ready to read about the future of computing on the Internet whether you call it edge computing, serverless, or just-let-me-run-my-code.
Since many people haven’t used Cloudflare Workers yet, we’ll also be running a weeklong set of Developer Challenges designed to introduce new users to the platform through our Discord channel and a set of challenges that help them learn all the features.
Haven’t forgotten experienced Cloudflare Workers users though! There will also be Developer Challenges for people who already build on the platform to make sure they get the most out of it.
I hope that whether you’ve used Cloudflare Workers or not. Whether you’ve built something that runs “on the edge” or not, that this week will provide inspiration that it is possible to not worry about scaling, or deployment speed, or cold starts, or where your code needs to run.
Pure code, securely deployed in seconds, availability zone: Earth.