Cloudflare Pages goes full stack
blog.cloudflare.com
blog.cloudflare.com
What is your story with Pages and Rust Workers? Will they get the benefits of automatic deployment or is it still required to use Wrangler and manually wire things together?
Any plan to eventually offer drop-in support for Next.js? (Not just static builds, but the backend server/serverless functions too, like Vercel... maybe mapping certain APIs to Workers?). It would be lovely to be able to leverage the power of that framework on Cloudflare infrastructure.
Edit: Next and frameworks like it solve the "I love the idea of serverless, but don't want to reinvent the whole backend from scratch" problem. It's nice to have a framework abstract away problems like routing, caching, invalidations, buildchains, image transformations, etc. Cloudflare Pages and Workers can do almost all the same things, but requires more coding and configuration... that's the only reason we went with Next + Vercel instead of Pages.
But… This is almost just like an index.html and api.php file on a server. I think what devs really need/want is the Svelte Kit adaptor but an official Cloudflare way.
Edit: Apparently the functions support parameterized files like .functions/friends/[name].js [1] which creates a lot closer integration. Put that feature front and center! I think this really solves many issues.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-full-stack-with-pages/
Next.js is maintained by an entire company (Vercel). If Flareact ever gains official Cloudflare support, that'd be wonderful!
I really dislike the GitHub integration approach, but I get that it makes it simpler for some use cases.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/framework-guides/dep...
I’ve deployed a couple of static documentation sites with automated builds with the help of GitHub Actions [0].
[0]: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/github-pages-action
If only I'd waited one more week...
- Are Pages functions running Workers Unbound or Workers Bundled?
- Do functions support Worker composition announced yesterday [0]?
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-worker-services/
I'm building a svelte-kit based blogging framework called Svekyll with a hosting service called ExtraStatic. It all uses gitlab on the backend and I'm very curious if you could author on ExtraStatic and then publish into cloudflare. Right now I use the static adapter but I'm interested in seeing if the cloudflare adapter just works.
ExtraStatic is interesting because it allows you to publish without really knowing git. You can publish using just email, or you can use the creator tool or the Android app to publish into gitlab and then it builds automatically. Hosting on cloudflare would be awesome.
Very exciting stuff!
Sounds like what you're describing would be possible!
Unfortunately, it looks like this only works with gitlab.com. I don't think my GitLab instance will work as this blog post describes. It's still an incredibly cool offering and I am sure there is a way to do it with just vanilla CI inside my GitLab instance.
Hint hint, nudge nudge to both Cloudflare and Rich Harris :)
If I can create a full-stack preview environment comprised of all these services, that will be huge. It's edge (no pun intended) is that it's globally available by default.
Monday was Workers talking to external services + durable objects.
Tuesday was upgrades to workers and the toolkit to make it easer to develop full apps on them.
Wednesday (today) was Worker+Pages integration and front end development.
No announcements yet of any upgrades to the Worker Key Value store, wouldn't be surprised if they have a day of datastore type announcements - its the part of the "full stack" they haven't covered this week yet.
They have to climax on Friday with something big right?
I was worried for a bit, but they put a significant amount of time into explaining how they want to work with others to develop some kind of standard.
Hopefully the client API is also something that can make its way back into the browser at some point.
For context, our organisation has moved completely to Terraform for all our Cloud components, and not having Terraform support for Cloudflare Pages makes it a no-go. Even our Data Warehouse team has moved completely to Terraform, so something as 'webby' as static site hosting should be a simple use case.
I know there's a maker culture here but there's a limit sometimes.
Another example is pagerduty. A company that has been around for well over a decade with no product innovation. They installed an outside CEO, a sales/marketing person who really doesn't have the technical know-how to come up with new innovations. As of today, Datadog has entered their market with a direct competitor product. The CEO of Datadog, conversely, lived and breathed dev-ops in his entire work career. He is the wolf that will be eating the lunch of the non-technical does.
Cloudflare is smaller than Heroku?
Its too bad because Heroku is a great product that has a ton more potential.
Netlify Raises $105M (netlify.com)
Netlify Acquires OneGraph (netlify.com)
Cloudflare Pages Goes Full Stack (cloudflare.com)
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out..
I knew when WASM was introduced, this will bring out a new dimension of computing power available at affordable cost. But I wasn't sure how. But now I know. Cloudflare is doing some incredible work here, launching cloudflare workers and then capitalizing it to bring low cost computing to other edges. If lucky, we might enter an era where cloud infrastructure doesn't gets polarized into hands of tech giants like amazon, microsoft and stays affordable as it once was.
Hetzner Cloud will give you around 16-32GB and more than 4 cores for <50$. For similar amount of money you can also get a dedicated server from them (and many other providers) with > 60GB of RAM, > 4 cores and nvme. Scaleway, OVH and others also have offerings that are not too far off (but less familiar with their offerings).
They may even continue to email you reminders about your trial expiring and tell you that you can still use all the free tier offerings, even though you can't log in anymore because the account is gone.
just my .02 but that first sentence is way more confusing than it needs to be.
But I haven't used it, so I don't know.
Literally you can just control a lot more about your stack and do what you want (mysql, outside APIs, etc.) and use your servers as origin servers for the CDN. You can take your regular PHP site, separate out the "session-dependent" stuff into a separate service, and the rest is static resources that can be cached.
Or even better: do ACTUAL serverless:
https://qbix.com/blog/2018/04/03/onward-to-qbix-platform-2-0...
https://qbix.com/blog/2020/01/02/the-case-for-building-clien...
I gave a talk recently about it, that you might be interested in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKPKuH6YCTc
I'm going to drink the Kool-aid and see how it tastes :-)
Recently adding esbuild to the mix made things much faster, too.
So, I looked at other options, and discovered Svelte. I originally converted from Vue to Svelte out of necessity, but I've grown to adore how it's structured and how "Javascripty" it feels.
I feel it's now within reach to migrate one of my side projects, except Redis and Postgres which I'll have to keep on AWS for now.
It seems they're building a fully integrated developer experience that abstracts so much complexity away from deployment, security and otherwise.
I have to imagine database and other solutions like pub/sub will be coming at some point in the future, too.
(disclosure: long $NET)
I think Vercel and Render are both doing an incredible job with their deploy processes, and a lot is owed to them not requiring use of a CLI. I wonder if I'm in the minority here?
It didn't do the one commit one subdomain though but maybe they are adding it with this announcement.
I hope the free tier stays as good as it is now! Thanks folks :)
You can only spend so many hours in your life tweaking and re-testing CORS headers for no reason.
Maybe Pages is better. I just don't want to touch Workers on the backend of Pages anymore.
I think a comment like this deserves some details!
Most of these platforms also don't have actual hard limits so it's possible to use up whatever budget is allotted to a project and then get throttled randomly without any indication of what exactly happened or why exactly the limits where reached. Maybe things have improved since last time I tried these platforms but I'm doubtful. It's very hard to design easily debuggable systems when there are so many layers of abstraction involved and there is no way to actually set breakpoints and see what is going on in the live process.
Will a node/C thing work?
No. Only third party packages that are cleanly isomorphic will work. The most exciting thing you get is fetch. You can compile things to WebAssembly I guess.
is performance good?
For HTTP response times it‘s top notch. For compute, if it matters then it‘s not a good use case imho.
If you‘ve had performance issues with workers (not compute bound) I would like to hear about them, because I have put it into a "way to go when I want every answer to be reliably fast" bucket.
Debugging?
Well… it‘s a matter taste if what they provide is enough. Better than lambda but worse then a local server.
[1]: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170056-U...
Cloudflare already have a better technology stack, that delivers a better visitor experience
Netlify is Apache Traffic Server with bits wrapped around it, there's no CDN to speak of, limited feature set etc.