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Comment by babelfish | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me a bit of Cloudflare Workers / fly.io

Fly.io doesn't look much at all like Cloudflare Workers; it's not a Javascript API, but rather a platform for running arbitrary containers in discrete VMs.

Yes, I didn't get the Fly.io association either, but CFW looks about right.

I mean, I guess all 3 are ways to run code closer to users. We really like Deno here! I'm maybe less bullish on the prospect of coding to a particular CDN's Javascript API (which is not a problem Deno has).

Deno and CFW both try to be close to web standards.

Deno Deploy so far feels a lot closer though. For instance, CFW forces you to bundle your code into 1 js file, whereas with Deno Deploy you can just point to an arbitrary .js hosted anywhere on the internet, and any transitive dependencies will be fetched and cached for subsequent runs. It doesn't support dynamic imports yet, but fingers crossed that's on the roadmap.

UPDATE: apparently CFW has been updated to support deploying as unbundled files since I last checked.

CFW now supports modules, and allows you to upload them unbundled and import/export between them.

Very nice! Glad to hear they've addressed this limitation. Updated the original post.

> I'm maybe less bullish on the prospect of coding to a particular CDN's Javascript API (which is not a problem Deno has).

Workers, Sites, Workers KV, and now Durable Objects... it is much more than a JS API. I recently experimented with Durable Objects and they do make developing against a kv-database much simpler, even if it is limited while in beta. Our development is all-in Cloudflare atm, but we also look fondly at fly.io to move other workloads (over from AWS) that Cloudflare won't / can't support.

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound dismissive! The thing I'm not bullish about is people programming directly to a set of CDN APIs. What I like about Deno is that it runs anywhere. There's clearly an upside to programming directly to your CDN! It lets you integrate more ambitiously!

What kind of workloads have you moved over to CF that you have found were a good fit for the Workers model?

Web server, rate limiter, fronting actual servers (api gateway / reverse proxy), user auth / user data (db), and file hosting (downloads).

Interestingly, fly.io did do something very similar with javascript in the beginning, before they pivoted to their current container based model.

Ah, okay.

Then I learned about them after this pivot, I guess.

I am equally excited about cross between WASM (and its nanoprocess model) and k8s: https://krustlet.dev/

Things are looking up for serverless + edge computing, given 5G deployments are also gathering speed.

How does 5G factor into all that?

See: https://archive.is/xvjrw (How 5G changes the data center, datacenterdynamics.com)

Yes, looks like Cloudflare Workers.

or fluence.network

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