Cloudflare Durable Objects, Now in Open Beta

I think much of Cloudflare's capabilities are underappreciated and underestimated.

I do analytics work for an agency, and had one multi-national client that had their sites behind a traditional "bigco" networking stack such as F5 load balancers, Imperva web application firewalls, etc. Due to the particular setup they had for one site, third party scripts loading on the site (not tracking scripts, but libraries from third party services providing user-visible functionality on the site).

The setup also completely broke any sort of analytics scripts as well, due to the way traffic was intercepted/analyzed by the web application firewall.

This had been the state of things for years before I came on, because it simply wasn't resolvable within the constraints of their enterprise networking policies and infrastructure. Cloudflare web workers had just come out, and I was able to hash out a proof of concept that

1) Left all of the pre-existing legacy networking infrastructure as-is without undermining the intent behind any of it, and therefore required minimal internal red tape nor one-off exceptions. While

2) Handling all of the jankiness introduced by it within the web worker itself, ultimately serving a "proper" response to the client that completely mitigated all of the issues that had been introduced.

It fixed the analytics stuff that was my headache, and made me happy. It fixed the constant breakage on other stuff, which made the devs happy. It left the legacy infrastructure in place, which made enterprise IT happy. It provided a legitimate business justification to introduce Cloudflare in a minor and targeted manner to this stodgy environment, which made the enterprise networking team I had to work with excited and collaborative. It was minimally invasive and cheap, making the entire process legitimately feasible vs. a dead in the water pipedream. It solved all kinds of "unsolvable" problems that had plagued that site for years, which made the marketing client with power over our agency contract happy.

After the fact, it was interesting to absorb and appreciate the entire thing. At the end of the day it was an elegant but ultimately minor bit of technical work. But it was only achievable because of the availability, flexibility, and ease of use of web workers by Cloudflare. The end result could have been achieved by any number of things, but only this solution checked all the right boxes to be able to slither from hair-brained scheme while cursing my analytics data, past the numerous barriers and objections, all the way to POC and production implementation. With a bonus of planting a seed in a massive, technically-stodgy bigco for the use of Cloudflare in their enterprise architecture.