Cloudflare is known for its presence in providing its CDN services all across the globe to make the websites/content faster, they have been providing support for DDoS Protection and even they are the one behind the world’s first global Non-Root DNS Service 1.1.1.1.
They’ve come with yet another innovative usage of their massive cloud infrastructures which is to provide Compute over Edge in form of their Cloud Workers service. The main benefit of this service is that it’s Serverless, Which means that as a user we need to pay only for the requests that we process using their computer and just to let you know they have a free tier as well.
Let’s first understand the benefits of Cloudflare workers.
On-Edge Compute Power
Cloudflare Workers are the compute engines deployed across Cloudflare’s existing vast network which would allow developers to leverage the on-edge compute capabilities for their website and content. This would reduce the turnaround time needed for usual requests that get processed by the backend services deployed across different cloud infrastructures.
High-Performance V8 JavaScript Engine
The current public cloud computing platform would allow you to bring your custom code over pre-defined run-time environments deployed over containers or virtual machines. But Cloudflare doesn’t use containers or virtual machines to power their Workers.
Cloudflare Workers uses a technology built by the Google Chrome team to power the Javascript engine, V8: Isolates.
Low Latency Deployments
Isolates are lightweight contexts that group variables with the code allowed to mutate them. Most importantly, a single process can run hundreds or thousands of Isolates, seamlessly switching between them. They make it possible to run untrusted code from many different customers within a single operating system process. They’re designed to start very quickly (several had to start in your web browser just for you to load this web page) and to not allow one Isolate to access the memory of another.
No Cold Starts
Current all public cloud computing platform providing serverless infrastructures has few milliseconds of lag when it comes to deploying your application code. The difference in the case of Cloudflare workers is that with the V8 engine running itself on the machine with a predefined runtime environment it doesn’t need to start containers before running your code.
In case you are looking for a way to migrate your existing applications to Serverless Infrastructure, we at Datavizz help an enterprise to create an enterprise migration strategy to migrate your product to a Serverless application stack.
Stay tuned for the next set of blogs on Applications of Cloudflare Workers.