I imagine Cloudflare Workers is better than AWS Lambda (or Lambda at Edge) at handling sharp traffic spikes, since the use of V8 isolates yields much lower cold start times than AWS's micro-VMs. Does anyone have real experience with both models?
Cloudflare workers took a different approach - they run V8 node-ish processes on all their edges, and you submit your code as JS or WASM that fits their interface (which is based on the service worker standard). They then execute it as a V8 isolate, which is blazing fast because the V8 process is already up and running, it’s just running JS/WASM code, which it knows how to do pretty well. Even the cold start is pretty small, because the JS/WASM tends to be pretty small and Cloudflare knows how to cache stuff.
They’re both very different systems, but both have their uses.
Cloudflare definitely has a place, but is definitely nowhere near as feature rich as the AWS ecosystem. For this use case it was perfect. Lack of warm up and responsiveness on cloudflare is a strong draw.
Here is my previous article on our AWS donation system.
https://read.iopipe.com/the-journey-to-90-serverless-at-comi...