- Security and reliability company Cloudflare Inc (NYSE: NET) has announced the release of Cloudflare Workers Unbound, which offers a serverless platform for developers with flexibility, performance, security, ease of use, and pricing advantages
Security and reliability company Cloudflare Inc (NYSE: NET) has announced the release of Cloudflare Workers Unbound, which offers a serverless platform for developers with flexibility, performance, security, ease of use, and pricing advantages. And with Cloudflare Workers Unbound, developers can run complicated computing workloads across the Cloudflare network and pay only for what they use. Plus Cloudflare Workers Unbound can save users up to 75% for the same workloads running on legacy and centralized serverless platforms like AWS Lambda.
The Cloudflare Workers edge computing platform originally launched for developers in September 2017. And as of this past quarter, more than 20,000 developers created new applications running on Cloudflare Workers. Now more than 10% of traffic through Cloudflare’s global network is powered by Cloudflare Workers.
Cloudflare Workers Unbound offers a broad set of benefits to developers:
1.) Limitless — Developers are able to run heavy workloads without having to worry about overly restrictive CPU constraints and pay only for what they use.
2.) Cost-Effective — For the same workload, Cloudflare Workers Unbound can be 75% less expensive than AWS Lambda, 24% less expensive than Microsoft Azure Functions, and 52% less expensive than Google Cloud Functions.
3.) No Hidden Fees — Developers do not pay for hidden extras like API gateway or DNS request fees.
4.) No Cold Starts — Cloudflare Workers Unbound is the first serverless platform to offer out of the box support for 0 nanosecond cold start times compared with cold starts on other platforms that can take seconds and add unpredictable variability.
5.) Unthrottled CPU — Other serverless platforms throttle CPU thus resulting in workloads that take longer. And the efficiency of the Cloudflare Workers isolates architecture lets Cloudflare run CPUs unthrottled so users can get more done per second of compute time.
6.) Fast Globally — Workloads are able to run across the Cloudflare network, spanning over 200 cities in more than 100 countries thus reducing average network latency for users everywhere in the world.
7.) Instant Updates — Developers are able to update their code and have it live globally in 15 seconds, compared to the minutes it can take to update on other serverless platforms.
8.) Broad Language Support — Developers can write code in the languages they know and love such as JavaScript, C, C
9.) Automatic Scaling — Cloudflare Workers Unbound automatically scales to meet demand without developers needing to worry about spinning up new instances.
10.) Robust Debugging Tools — Developers are able to achieve more productivity with new tools to simplify debugging and diagnosing problems.
11.) Secure By Design — The platform is built for withstanding the latest security threats, including sophisticated timing attacks. And it was reviewed by the team that discovered the Spectre class of vulnerabilities.
Cloudflare is going to continue to offer the original Cloudflare Workers model — now known as Cloudflare Workers Bundled — with its radically simple pricing for basic workloads. And Cloudflare Workers Unbound now allows the hundreds of thousands of developers using the Cloudflare Workers platform to create even more complex applications without having to worry about overly restrictive limits.
Currently, Workers Unbound is a private beta. Developers can sign up at: https://www.cloudflare.com/workers-unbound-beta/
KEY QUOTES:
“Cloudflare Workers Unbound is the most compelling serverless platform available. I challenged our team to build a platform that didn’t just compete with niche edge computing solutions, but would provide developers the fastest, most secure, most flexible, and most cost-effective general-purpose serverless offering — period. I’m incredibly proud of Cloudflare Workers Unbound and can’t wait to see what developers will build with it.”
— Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare
“Serverless promises both a radical new economic model for compute, and a radically simplified programming model, with the developer focusing on orchestration and composition of rich back end services. Autoscaling, performance, observability, built-in security and support for a range of modern programming languages are all provided by the infrastructure. Cloudflare Workers Unbound is designed to provide best in class performance, taking advantage of a global edge network, competing directly with existing cloud serverless platforms on a cost for cost basis.”
— James Governor, RedMonk co-founder and analyst
“Cloudflare Workers has quickly proven itself to be a key part of providing a best-in-class user experience. We use Workers extensively for core application delivery, download authentication, spam and abuse mitigation, and more. Our engineers now reach for Workers first to solve many kinds of challenges.”
— Mark Smith, Director of Infrastructure at Discord
“Optimizely uses Workers to deliver a personalized, targeted response for every request. Cloudflare’s global network, and the consistent low latency of their edge compute platform, leveled the playing field and let us ship products previously out of reach.”
— Michael Hood, Senior Staff Performance Engineer at Optimizely
“We have been using Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV at the edge of our stack for about a year now. We appreciate the degree of control these tools have given us. Performant and malleable, Workers has improved our platform stability while giving us enormous flexibility.”
— Frank Sharpe, Product Developer at ProPublica
