I thought the reason why Cloudflare Workers were great is that they utilize the many CDN points that Cloudflare owns. Or you can use Blueboat with say Fastly and achieve nearly the same thing?
How about 0ms cold starts?
Is this actually open source cloudflare workers or just open source serverless functions?
> Blueboat is not yet optimized for global-scale operation but it is definitely the goal. Things not implemented include: custom TLS termination (which enables 0ms cold start)
In building complex SaaS apps, there's usually a constant flow of customer requests for custom features. Scripting, if managed very carefully [0], can provide an outlet for that and also allow people to glue together different features. AWS pushes people towards Lambda for customizing/gluing different AWS services.
A product could use AWS Lambda for its own scripting/glue, but that may end up being a little bit too free-form and depending on the use case Lambda cold start times may be unacceptable. So something like Blueboat could eventually be useful for running untrusted code to power customization of SaaS apps. This is especially the case if your service isn't marketed toward developers who can easily run their own Lambdas.
[0] Opening your app to scripting automatically exposes a huge API surface area which you'll likely have to support for a long time.
To be honest, how Cloudflare Workers work is a bit of a mystery to me as I've only done some very basic prototyping with the service (and not really focusing on the "edge" aspect of them), but it seems like the important "stuff" that makes them what they are is how they are deployed.
I am REALLY going to show my ignorance here, but is there some chance that the idea is these "workers" are intended to be deployed in the users browser for example, as actual service workers or something? i.e. is this more of a framework for creating service workers vs running in the "backend"?
the only difference is that your browser is cloudflare and globally-distributed
Its not a server, but the promise a server will be there if someone hits that endpoint. Anything client side is not changed.
The genius of Cloudflare Workers is that it couples the one place Cloudflare beats Amazon (their global ubiquity and edge deployment) into a product feature that a customer cares about.
The real genius of AWS at all wasn't "We can sell a thing people will buy" but rather "We can sell excess capacity on a thing we have to have, in order to offer {other, core product}."
And Cloudflare has to have network connectivity and minimal latency.