Cloudflare Pages: the best way to build JAMstack websites | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare Pages: the best way to build JAMstack websites

blog.cloudflare.com

265 pointsadspedia88 comments

I was wondering when this was going to happen! This is a legitimate contender here against Gatsby, Netlify, AWS Amplify and the like

One thing I like about this over all the others is they aren’t (to my knowledge) just reselling AWS features with added convenience (not that this is an issue or bad, but this a lot of what Netlify does with their lamdas for instance, if I recall correctly) and their CDN is top notch IMO as well. I’m very excited to see how this plays out especially when they add the full stack backend to the mix with durable object storage and broader more fully features edge workers with KV storage

I do wonder if they’ll add GraphQL support out of the box (for instance a ready to configure and use a GQL worker)

Also curious if they will solve for the ability for JAMstack sites to have more real time features via SSE or websockets through their worker platform

Genuinely excited! Sadly they aren’t hiring for WFH and their SF office didn’t have any postings related to working on this from what I can tell :(

I can only dream of working on such cool things

Don't let a lack of a job posting stop you, I would find someone on twitter and reach out.

There is (now?) an explicit "P.S. We're hiring" on the page ;-)

Netlify maintains its own edge network that's actually deployed across various clouds. You are right that Netlify uses AWS lambdas to power Netlify Functions, but that was chosen for the wide support AWS lambda enjoys as a standard. The upcoming edge handlers (in beta) execute javascript directly on Netlify edge nodes worldwide.

Yeh, but Netlify also has broken HTTP/2 prioritization whereas Cloudflare has working prioritization

There's also a big difference between deploying CDN nodes at the Edge as CloudFlare does and deploying ‘Edge Nodes’ in other cloud hosting providers which won't really be at the edge.

This looks great, I have a bunch of Gatsby and Hugo sites I've created (mostly with Stackbit) that I'm going to try and host with this new offering. I've been using Netlify until now because it was the default

This is probably going to go somewhere, and it's good to see Netlify get some more competition, but this announcement kind of lost me at:

> There are no great solutions.

Therea are plenty of existing solutions here that do pretty much the same thing, including Netlify, Vercel, and going all the way back to Heroku.

Cloudflare is expanding their product line, which is fine, but lets not pretend that this is some brand new ground-breaking deployment methodology.

> ... lets not pretend that this is some brand new ground-breaking ... methodology

Except this script has been working very well.

It makes all kinds of sense for CloudFlare to simply declare a reality where features are novel and their offering is the only one relevant.

Scaled stability is hard, scaled awareness of technical solutions is hard, so ... tech chops + reality distortion field = potent.

I can only speak to Netlify and Vercel, both really good steps forward but very immature solutions.

There is some marketing here to be sure, but in some sense, they are at least partially right in that:

- they aren’t just reselling AWS services (if I recall correctly Netlify and to at least some extent Vercel do, for instance)

- They will be providing their own database platform (coming soon according to the blog post, as of 12/17/2020) which means they can provide the ability to have a single end to end provider for my app. (Interested to know if CloudFlare will provide a secure user authentication layer on top)

- they have one of the world's largest CDNs, no other player really offers that out of the box (though you can just as easily integrate with theirs, it’s just not as convenient and I’m sure the integration there will play out accordingly)

- They are offering workers out of the box, which are a lot like lambdas, in that they run some arbitrary function(s) when called, but have greater capabilities beyond that with the system since they are “CloudFlare Aware”

It’s not all untrue, however:

To your point, it’s very much a marketing message vs a hard reality in that services offer a good deal of feature parity and this is more of a leap in the current iteration of things rather than a pure innovation in the problem space. You can readily achieve this today with some combination of Heroku + CloudFlare CDN, for instance (and that would include edge workers, if you so choose)

I imagine this wouldn't be terribly hard to emulate with AWS Amplify[0] either, though. I like that CloudFlare is offering something not directly tied to AWS or another cloud provider explicitly (I'm not talking about them using it for extra compute or what have you. I know that CloudFlare has their own network of servers and generally they're selling access to their metal, not another provider(s))

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/

Yes, Cloudflare's offering here has promises of adding more functionality in the future, but I don't think that changes my point. At the moment, it is fundamentally the same as existing tools.

"Worker" functionality is already available on both Netlify and Vercel.

Cloudflare's version will obviously have a tighter integration into the rest of Cloudflare.

I've written up a summary of tools/options in this space in the past (but it is a bit out-of-date, but space is moving fast). Including Cloudflare Pages, I now count 6 platform-add-on features that cover all of this functionality.

https://www.nrmitchi.com/2020/10/state-of-continuous-product...

It is fundamentally different: concerning service offerings, your static site and your edge cache can both be handled by CloudFlare.

Maybe that’s a nitpick, but it probably feels earth-shattering to some, because it recategorizes CloudFlare as a first-class hosting provider (and soon-to-be application and database layer), not just a cache. Sort of like how Redis is now a first-class database, at least according to them.

Personally, I’m excited about this because it finally represents an edge someone has (no pun intended) that could compete with AWS’s services for JAMStack-style sites and apps.

> "Worker" functionality is already available on both Netlify and Vercel.

Workers at those providers do not run _at the edge_ for each request. They lean on AWS Lambda to pre-generate or render assets, but you can't reliably run a function there on every user-facing request without a noticeable latency penalty.

Vercel's functions do run at the edge, but Netlify's are just AWS Lambda functions.

How is this different than Vercel? We already has a big CF account so it would be easy to move there (we have a bunch of Stackbit sites that are currently deployed on Vercel)

> no other player really offers that out of the box

S3 + cloudfront?

Perfect timing, I was planning on launching a new personal blog next week. Was gonna use GitHub Pages fronted by Cloudflare but this is even better since it has preview and password capabilities.

If anybody from Cloudflare is listening I would love to get on the beta asap. Would also be great if you had some ready to go simple, clean blogging templates :)

I'm generally impressed with the direction Cloudflare is moving, they have some really powerful and innovative infrastructure primitives (workers, durable objects) and a killer network. Going to be interesting to see how they take advantage of that as they build out higher level offerings.

By the way, if anybody has recommendations for simple, clean, modern looking blog template (something like medium) that they have actually used, I am all ears. So far I have found theses two:

- https://github.com/jekyll/minima

- https://github.com/wowthemesnet/mediumish-theme-jekyll/

Minima is a little too minimal and mediumish seems a little muchish, but I don't want to spend too much time searching for the perfect theme so unless something else lands at my feet I probably just pick one and start writing.

I was also planning to publish new blog with minimal template. Here is one https://lumen.netlify.app/ with gatsby This has 100 performance on lighthouse tests and also pwa implemented.

Thx, I'll check it out!

I understand the need for launching with GitHub integration only, really. It's probably 2020 table stakes for launching a hosting platform, ticking the "up and running in 5 minutes" requirement checkbox. (See also: Digital Ocean's recently launched App Platform, same situation.)

But many of us walked away from GitHub and embraced GitLab in the last few years, probably a big wave in 2018. As far as I can tell, there's not a publicly documented non-GitHub way to interact with Cloudflare Pages. Cloudflare folks: if you can't launch with a full GitLab integration that's understandable, but I'm tired of sitting these things out because they can only launch in simple mode. For my part, I'd rather fuss around with .gitlab-ci.yml now than start a project on my old GitHub account and deal with unknown migration pains later.

It's disappointing that Github doesn't have repository mirroring, like many competitors do. I suppose that would encourage people to leave their walled garden but still take advantage of their features.

Seems very similar to Netlify, which is a good thing. Commits get their own preview URLs and branches get their own dedicated alias. Had a quick look at their pricing as well and the main difference is the Cloudflare free plan is limited to 500 builds per month as opposed to Netlify's 300 build _minutes_ per month and that Cloudflare offer unlimited bandwidth instead of 100GB per month. I am excited to start using this.

It’s a bad day for Netlify. I had issues with them before and I’m already fronting some sites with CloudFlare, so… I guess I know what I’m doing next week.

I've had the same number of issues over the last few years with Netlify and Cloudflare. With Netlify I was able to rehost easily, with Cloudflare, I was screwed because they were the DNS provider as well and changing nameservers is slow

Cloudflare is increasingly becoming one of the more interesting companies out there. I feel like they're shifting more and more from being a straight up CDN and trying to dip their toes into things that are closer to but not quite exactly IaaS.

Kind of like a better developer experience on top of certain AWS services.

Cloudflare has been a lot more than a CDN for a long time.

This expands what CF means as a potential developer platform. I plan to test Pages this weekend with a Jekyll Stackbit site.

TBH we've never been a "straight up CDN".

I find it absolutely fascinating that the CEO, CTO, PMs, the techs etc. all are actively replying on HN no matter if it is regarding a 2 page personal blog or a full blown e-commerce enterprise customer.

This builds a lot of trust in Cloudfare imho. Thank you!

Their slogan has always been "build a better internet". I find their product strategy every fascinating

Other exciting news from article:

> Over the coming months, we’ll be working on integrating Workers and Pages into a seamless experience. It’ll work the exact same way Pages does: just write your code, git push, and we’ll deploy it for you. The only difference is, it won’t just be your frontend, it’ll be your backend, too. And just to be clear: this is not just for stateless functions. With Workers KV and Durable Objects, we see a huge opportunity to really enable any web application to be built on this platform

Also:

> With Cloudflare Pages, each commit gets its own unique URL. Preview URLs make it easier to get meaningful code reviews without the overhead of pulling down the branch.

> each feature branch will have its own dedicated consistent alias, allowing you to have a consistent URL for the latest changes.

Preview Environments are slowly being added into most existing platforms, which is great. They are insanely useful.

Cloudflare would really put themselves ahead of the pack if they're able to get a seamless Preview experience that includes stateful backend services.

Agree. I keep calling that Serverless 2.0. 1.0 being basically a fast cache clearing CDN.

Workers is so cool but the starting point is a a bit rough. It looks like they have big plans and will eventually have a full pipeline vs the current Wrangler + scripts situation.

I think it would be extremely useful to have some type of simple authentication system for the preview URLs. I think the One-Time Pin Login [1] available with Cloudflare Access would be a really great fit if I could drive it from a list of email addresses in the GitHub repo.

As a use case, consider a small project where someone is looking for very preliminary feedback and wants to ask friends, family, trusted colleagues, etc. for feedback on non-public previews, but without the burden of a full blown authentication system.

I suppose that depends on whether or not it supports private repos. I don't like the systems that require public repos.

1. https://developers.cloudflare.com/access/authentication/conf...

You're just one step ahead of us :)

We'll be working on building in one-click configuration to have Cloudflare Access in front of your preview deployments specifically for this purpose.

More good news: we support private repos today :)

That's awesome! The thing that would make it valuable to me would be to send links to friends or family that have never heard of Cloudflare. If it got tied into Cloudflare Teams or something that added even the tiniest bit of friction it would significantly devalue it IMO. For example, I'd consider OAuth "log in with X platform" to be too much friction. Signing up for an account somewhere would never happen, at least for my use case.

The ideal scenario for me would be if I'm on the phone or video conferencing with someone and can send a link to their email that would grant them instant access with a single click, plus repeat access by doing the one-time-pin flow.

Do you know of any Cloudflare products that would let me build something like that one-time-pin auth flow into a user facing app driven by Workers? Most of the info I can find seems to assume it's going to be used to protect internal resources for companies and the pricing would never work for a user facing app. I might just be missing it though. It took me a while to figure out MS has Azure B2B vs Azure AD which is a similar scenario.

Just rouging it out in my head, I think (I'm probably getting some of it wrong) I could build something like that that's really inexpensive to run using Workers. I'm thinking something like 1 invocation for "unauthorized", a second for the auth request + JWT generation + email link, and a +1 per request cost for a worker to check the JWT / resource request.

IIRC Workers are $0.50/million runs with KV to match, so I could do _a lot_ of authenticating for $5. Compare that to something like Cognito where it's $275 USD for your second 50k users and the one-time-pin style auth running on Workers starts to feel like a good option for low value accounts that don't require a sophisticated auth system with 2FA, etc..

I say that in the context of thinking about a product where people would log in so infrequently they'd probably be doing a password reset anyway. Or they could just be like my parents where every login is a password reset. Lol.

I’d love to see a version of this (or Netlify, Vercel, etc) that didn’t bundle CI with the preview and deploy steps so that I can pick my own CI and then effectively use the “CDN” as the highly qualified host of my static assets.

Couldn't you build that with Cloudflare Workers relatively easily?

Maybe? It’s more that I’d like to pay for the managed service of hosting my assets, registering branches for long lived access URLs, getting preview links, and promoting my site to its latest version.

Differently: why are Cloudflare and others interested in running my build?

They probably see that most people don’t want to deal with setting up their own build, and want to make adoption as easy as possible.

Though they should definitely make it optional.

I think the target market here appreciates the one stop Solution given the big players here have always offered that.

I think alternative build integrations would be good though I do agree with that full stop. There should be a way to hook into the system from an outside pipeline to notify that a build is ready and able to be uploaded

I’d bet it will be an enterprise only feature first once though once it happens, we shall see

Yes, you can...the feature people have been using, which existed before Cloudflare pages is "Workers Sites". https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/sites

So, the difference here is that pages is free?

edit: This offering appears fairly similarly to the paid Workers Sites one. What changed that this is now free?

Workers, also now has a free tier, with some usage limitations: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing

The "Workers Sites" works differently than "Cloudflare Pages", at least from the developers side. You're using their wrangler tool instead of passing a git repo to their CI/CD setup.

hey, dev advocate for workers here!

you can definitely do something similar with workers sites.

we recently added workers kv - the storage mechanism behind workers sites - to our free workers tier, so you can host your static sites on workers for free as well.

pages is an evolution of that with better tooling/dx for people who want to get a static site up on our network and want things like deploy previews and pre-configured github integration.

if you want to just have workers do the hosting and want to do all the CI stuff yourself, you can use something like wrangler-action[1] to simplify the process on github actions, or just install wrangler[2] (our CLI) as part of your CI workflow and do `wrangler publish` at the end.

i wrote our github action, so if you decide to go that route, happy to help debug or look over the project to make sure it'll do what you want - i'm @signalnerve on twitter, DMs are open :)

[1] https://github.com/cloudflare/wrangler-action

[2] https://github.com/cloudflare/wrangler

Me too. I hate that Vercel and Netlify limit my build to using Node v12 because that is what Amazon supports. Node v14 is LTS now but still no telling when it will be a supported runtime. I refuse to live without optional chaining!

https://www.moovweb.com/

https://developer.moovweb.com/

We built this as a 'control plane' for everything above your backend APIs. You can bring your own CI/CD and get the same 'infinite staging' and other features that help bring Jamstack principles to large, dynamic websites.

CloudFlare has leveraged the fact that they are pretty close to the sole provider of DDoS (which 99% of people don't need to worry about) beautifully.

Once your in for the DNS/DDoS/Nginx-as-a-service adding anything else is a matter of hop/latency minimization. Like I love and use Netlify but I'm always happy to reduce hops where I can.

> sole provider of DDoS

I should hope not…

At the hobbyist/self-funded budget, they are by a longshot.

This is huge!

"It’ll work the exact same way Pages does: just write your code, git push, and we’ll deploy it for you. The only difference is, it won’t just be your frontend, it’ll be your backend, too. And just to be clear: this is not just for stateless functions. With Workers KV and Durable Objects, we see a huge opportunity to really enable any web application to be built on this platform."

The three primitives to anything on the internet is

1) static assets - just served as is to the client (cf pages/cdn) 2) dynamic api - compute per client request (cf workers) 3) a fast and consistent data store - (cf kv / objects)

The three primitives allow any developer to build powerful serverless services. Plus they have built in analytics and other nice extras.

What I want next from cloudflare is being able to run containers like google cloud run, and a nice firestore like database. That would make cloudflare a pretty amazing cloud provider.

Genuinely curious — what would you expect to get from containers that you can't get from building on Workers + Pages as described above?

Containers allow any programming language. Any sets of apt-get installed dependencies.

Workers and pages only work with js at a very specific version of v8. Many node native modules don’t work with it, so in that sense it’s quite limited

Always pleased to see more alternatives to Netlify/Vercel. I love how easy Netlify makes it to deploy things, but I don't really understand their pricing.

I recently built a pretty basic static webapp that would have racked up around £100 in bandwidth charges (~0.5TB) in the first 24 hours on Netlify. I stuck it on BunnyCDN instead after I realised this and it ended up costing around £3. The five or so minutes I save manually running and uploading the build each time is not worth many hundreds of pounds a month.

Netlify's bandwidth charges seem excessive, but then Vercel and DO App Platform are comparable, so maybe I'm missing something. I guess CDN companies have an advantage here. I'd be happy to pay Netlify money for all the sites I host that don't use a lot of bandwidth, but they insist in hosting them for free.

Anyone reselling AWS services wants to price bandwidth above AWS' price, and AWS' bandwidth pricing is high. (E.g. AWS EC2 in us-east-1 to the internet costs up to ~0.09/GB, so your ~0.5 TB would end up at around £33 - although Netlify will obviously have some volume discounts.)

I haven't dealt with AWS very much, but I suspected that might be the case. Thanks for the figures. I guess the margins on bandwidth must be quite significant for cloud service providers.

If anyone was confused like I was as to what form the beta access page is talking about, it loads a script from Marketo which most any content blocker by default will stop from loading. In my case, I had to toggle off Firefox's Enchanced Tracking Protection (and NextDNS... and uBlock Origin...)

What if I already have static HTML and just need a host? No builds (I do them locally), no frameworks, just an HTML structure. I'd love to just be able to point to a git repo and have the site published through Cloudflare, since it already sits in front of my site anyway.

Hi there, I'm the PM working on Cloudflare Pages. We don't have support for this now since we're still in beta, so not everything is there yet, but it's certainly a use case we intend to support. You'll just be able to specify no build step. :)

That's what I figured, thanks.

Linked in response to a question I asked below, it seems like you can use CloudFlare Workers to host a static site: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/sites

But also, from reading the Pages docs I wager you can also make the build command something like `echo done` and then set the build directory in your configuration to be `.`.

I might be getting confused reading their docs but isn't this what you want? https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/how-to/deploy-anythi...

With optional build command, can't you just leave it empty and then point to the directory that has your HTML files?

I saw your comment and implemented the ability to connect a repository of static files and host them on our app platform (Uffizzi.com) -- we have a generous free tier! Email is in my profile if you have any questions or feature requests.

I built an integration with Netlify that allows users of WeBase to build websites/applications with our tool and deploy to Netlify [1].

I'd love to be able to build a similar integration with Cloudflare pages.

How cool is it to build with a UI tool and deploy in seconds to global infrastructure?

[1] https://www.webase.com/blog/build-with-webase-deploy-to-netl...

Psyched to see this shipping! Congrats folks :)

thanks steve :) <3

I'm currently using Netlify for my personal website and it works flawlessly. The only thing that would make me go to Cloudflare is the 500 builds per month, no mentions of build time. While Netlify is limited to 300 minutes of build time per month, in free tier.

I think this is great, and I would love to see the automatic builds with preview urls for commits and branches extended to Cloudflare Workers.

They will first need to raise the script limit, which will mean rethinking how worker code is deployed to the edge. If you're going to have potentially hundreds of preview versions deployed per script, you can't eagerly push it to every server worldwide.

But in turn solving that problem and raising that limit will also open up Cloudflare Workers for more potential use cases. Currently if you want to deploy multi-tenant applications with customized per-tenant code on workers you would run out of scripts and need to set each tenant up with their own workers account.

Posting this here hoping someone from Cloudflare sees this. Your team features suck. Impossible to grant access to a single “site” or transfer ownership of a single site. Until you improve that, hard for an agency like ours to use this new Pages feature.

Also while your here, youR pricing is a mess across the platform. You have so many add-on extra costs per site and it’s really hard to understand how they interact with the different monthly plans.

You can always email me (jgc @ cloudflare) with feedback and I will get it to the right people.

Cloudflare: Are you planning on making the Docs pages available on Github? They 404 despite having links:

https://github.com/cloudflare/pages-docs/blob/master/src/con...

My interest is looking at how you do things for the Gatsby node structure.

Sorry about that — had to keep them separate to avoid spoilers ahead of launch, but trying to avoid a migration on launch day.

To satisfy your curiosity though for our Gatsby setup, you can actually check it out here: https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-docs (the rest of our docs are open source and built in the same way, the Pages docs will just go there as a subdirectory, same as the other products).

Doc engine itself is here: https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-docs-engine

Yay -- going to spend the holidays porting my personal website over to this.

Cloudflare has made it really easy to give them my money.

I think the only reason I pay for GitHub is to have a custom domain. Is Cloudflare offering this for free?

Yes.

I thought GitHub Pages lets you use custom domains for free.

Yep it's always been free to use a custom domain as far as I can remember.

https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/worki...

Interesting, just competition for netlify, vercel etc I guess.

Weird use of capitalized JAM... it's been accepted for a good portion of the year to now be Jamstack I thought.

Has anyone done the calculations on the pricing comparisons for github actions, netlify, vercel, cloudflare etc?

Does Cloudflare Pages support deploying Stackbit static sites?

This is great!

But it's also one small step along a path that leads to the end of the internet.

What does JAMstack means?

I think generally people are using the term in reference to https://jamstack.org/

I consider it pre-rendering javascript on the server and serving sites that are mostly html with javascript coming in on the browser to take over interactivity.

Cloudflare abandoned their previously permissive free speech stance. Are they really a company we want to give more centralized power and market share to? I'm concerned they may be yet another activist tech company who joins the deplatforming train, and would rather not rely on their products or evangelize them if that's the case. Given that they are essentially an Internet utility, I'd rather see them operate in a content-neutral manner except where the law forces them to take action.

Check their terms.[1]

First of all, you're giving them a license to your content for their purposes. "By submitting, posting, or publishing your content, suggestions, enhancement requests, recommendations, feedback, information, data, or comments (“Content”) to any Website or Online Service, you are granting Cloudflare a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free right and license (with the right to sublicense) to use, incorporate, exploit, display, perform, reproduce, distribute, and prepare derivative works of your Content. You will retain ownership of your Content, however, any use of your Content by Cloudflare may be without any compensation paid to you." For example, Cloudflare could make a copy of your site and monetize it.

Second, you can be cancelled at any time. "We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Websites and/or Online Services at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Websites and/or Online Services) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Websites and/or Online Services or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Websites and/or Online Services." For example, if you were promoting a product that competes with Cloudflare, your site could be taken down with no notice.

Those are the big ones. Also, there's no uptime guarantee, an overreaching indemnification clause, and the usual "I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further" clause.

It's about as bad as the Apple App Store.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/website-terms/

(no longer at cloudflare)

This is the TOS for cloudflare.com, not the TOS for cloudflare's services, I believe.

See https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ for the self-serve plan TOS, for example.

Crucial definitions:

> “Websites” refers to www.cloudflare.com, as well as the other websites that Cloudflare operates and that link to these Terms, and (ii) “Online Services” means Cloudflare’s products and services that are publicly available without a subscription or a Cloudflare account, including, but not limited to, the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver service, including 1.1.1.1 for Families, Cloudflare Time Services, and RPKI Portal.

Ah, they did make the terms disjoint. Google, in contrast, has overlaps, but the terms for the specific service have priority. "If these terms conflict with the service-specific additional terms, the additional terms will govern for that service."

Cloudflare does force you into arbitration if you buy their services, but at least it's AAA, not JAMS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com