Containers are available in public beta for simple, and programmable compute
blog.cloudflare.com
blog.cloudflare.com
This looks extremely expensive for anything other than a simple demo/toy project. I can’t think of a reason I’d use this for heavy services instead of using [anything else]. Maybe I’m not seeing the use-case?
If the container doesn't run any workloads, it doesn't cost you anything. Most of the compute i pay for sit idle most of the time.
This is amazing pricing.
The blog post answers this. Containers was built for folks who wanted to move rest of their workloads onto Cloudflare alongside Workers/R2/AI & other offerings.
From my experience, the Workers platform is real popular among indie developers, software shops, and shops building SaaS, who typically want zero-dev ops setup and usually pass down hosting costs to their customers.
That said, compared to new cloud providers like Fly/Railway, the pricing is indeed steep.
This is about using and abusing the _on-demand_ part.
The first example in the Getting started goes with sleepAfter = '10s'.
The same on Fly Machines is $31.00 (performance-1x, varies by region). Fly Machines has the same sleeping functionality as Cloudflare.
Rivet Containers also has a similar price point of $29.40, but takes a different approach to sleeping (opts for optimizing coldstarts + autoscaling over snapshotting). (I work at Rivet)
It seems like always-on containers are not viable on this, so what's the point?
(I work at Rivet)
Think CF lets you rate limit right?some form of it seems necessary with those egress rates