Cloudflare today announced the launch of the private beta of Workers Unbound, the latest step in its efforts to offer a serverless platform that can compete with the likes of AWS Lambda.
The company first launched its IT platform for workers in late 2017. Today it has "hundreds of thousands of developers" using it and in the last quarter alone, over 20,000 developers have created service-based applications, according to the society. Cloudflare also uses workers to power many of its services, but the platform's first iteration had some limitations. The idea behind Workers Unbound is to eliminate most of them and turn it into a platform capable of competing with the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google.
"The original motivation for us in building Cloudflare Workers were not supposed to sell it as a product, but because we were using it as an internal platform to create applications, "said Matthew Flare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince before today's announcement. "Today, Cloudflare Teams, which is our fastest growing product line, is running above the Cloudflare workers and has allowed us to innovate as fast as possible and to remain agile and agile and all those things that become more difficult as we progress. that you become bigger and bigger society. "
Prince noted that Cloudflare aims to expose all the services it develops for its internal consumption to third-party developers as well. "The fact that we were able to implement an entire Zscaler the competitor in no time is due to the fact that we had this platform and that we could build it ourselves, "he said.
The original Workers service will continue to function (but with the Workers Bundled moniker) and will essentially become Cloudflare's serverless platform for basic workloads that only work for a very short time. Unbound workers - as the name suggests - are intended for more complex and longer lasting processes.
When it launched Workers for the first time, the company claimed that its killer feature was speed. Today, Prince claims that speed obviously remains an important feature and Cloudflare Workers Unbound promises that it will substantially eliminate cold start latencies. But the developers also adopted the platform because of its scaling ability and price.
In fact, Workers Unbound, Cloudflare claims, is now significantly cheaper than similar offerings. "For the same workload, Cloudflare Workers Unbound can be 75% less than AWS Lambda, 24% less than Microsoft Azure features and 52 percent cheaper than Google Cloud Features, "says the company in today's press release.
As it turned out, the fact that Workers was also an edge computing platform was fundamentally an advantage, but not necessarily the reason why the developers adopted it.
Another feature highlighted by Prince is regulatory compliance. "I think the thing we are doing while we talk to our biggest corporate clients is that for real companies - not just the individual developer who hacks at home - but for real companies in financial services or anyone who has to do with a regulated sector, the only thing that exceeds ease of use is regulatory compliance, which is not sexy or interesting or anything else, but as if your GC said that you cannot use the XYZ platform, then you do not use the platform XYZ and this is the end of the story, "observed Prince.
Obviously, speed is something that developers will always take care of. Prince pointed out that the team was quite happy with the 5ms cold start times of the original Workers platform. "But we wanted to be better," he said. "We wanted to be the clearly fastest serverless platform forever - and the only number we know that no one else can beat is zero - unless they invent a time machine."
The way the team designed this is by queuing the process while the two servers are still negotiating their TLS handshake. "We are excited to be the first cloud computing platform that [offers], without additional costs, ready to use, zero milliseconds of cold start time, which also means less variability in performance. "
Cloudflare also claims that developers can update their code and make it work globally within 15 seconds.
Another area the team worked on was simplifying the use of the service in general. Key new features here include support for languages like Python and a new SDK that will allow developers to add support for their favorite languages as well.
Prince attributes to Cloudflare's ability to implement this platform, which is obviously heavy on computing resources - and to keep it accessible - for the fact that it has always been thought of as a security platform before (the team often said that CDN functionality was more or less incidental). For example, because it performed a thorough package inspection, the company's servers always had relatively powerful CPUs. "Our network has been optimized for CPU usage from the start and as a result has made it much more natural for us to extend our network in this way," he explained. "To date, the same machines that run our firewall products are the same machines that run our edge computing platform."
Looking ahead, Prince noted that while Workers and Workers Unbound present a distributed key-value repository, the team is looking to add more robust database infrastructure and distributed storage.
The team is also looking at how to decompose applications to bring them closer to where they will run. "You could imagine that in the future you could write an application and we say 'listen, the user-sensitive parts of the database application could be run in Portland, where you are, but if the database is located in Ashburn, Virginia, so latency sensitive parts in the database could be run there, "he said.