Cloudflare's Fullstack Week has seen the introduction of many interesting features to Cloudflare's platform.
My particular interest is in features which further empower developers to build compelling applications and web experiences.
Here are my Top 8 from their announcements this week:
8: Cloudflare's Developer Expert Program
→ Apply for the Cloudflare Developer Expert Program Here
You can apply for Cloudflare's Developer Expert Program yourself, or nominate a friend.
The community gives you:
- Early access to features
- Access to a private community of power users
- The ability to participate in calls with Cloudflare PMs, devs and dev advocates
- The opportunity to get sponsorship for OSS work
- Possibly some of Cloudflare's best swag
7: Cloudflare announces support for TCP, UDP and QUIC based protocols for Workers
→ Cloudflare Blogpost: Making connections with TCP and Sockets for Workers
This is NOT available yet, but is a work in progress. The new type of Workers with this support are going to be called “Socket Workers”.
Socket Workers will enable the creation of many new types of applications on the Workers platform.
Today in November 2021 while building with Workers you’re restricted to using HTTP and Websockets.
6: Network Performance Improvements
→ Cloudflare Blogpost: Network Performance Update: Full Stack Week
Cloudflare wants to have the fastest last mile network everywhere in the world.
A few months back, based on a number of metrics they were fastest in around 49% of the networks in the world.
Today, Cloudflare is the fastest in about 66% of the networks around the world - and they say they’re still looking to improve further!
5: Partnerships with CMSes and Data Platforms
→ Cloudflare Blogpost: Cloudflare Pages now partners with your favorite CMS
Cloudflare has now partnered with a handful of the most popular headless CMSes: Wordpress, Contentful, Sanity.io and Strapi.
In addition to this, Cloudflare has now open sourced an example SaaS application with a CMS built completely on top of the Cloudflare stack.
Also, in terms of databases and data platforms which are used by the applications for persisting their data: Cloudflare has announced support for MongoDB Atlas and Prisma.
4: Cloudflare have dropped all egress charges
→ Cloudflare Blogpost: Workers, Now Even More Unbound: 15 Minutes, 100 Scripts, and No Egress Fees
This is a direct response to all of the big cloud providers who (in November 2021) all have somewhat unjustifiably high charges for egress traffic.
It is also in anticipation of R2, the object storage product that Cloudflare announced a couple of months ago, which very impressively is does not have any charges for egress traffic.
3: General availability of Durable Objects
→ Cloudflare Blogpost: Durable Objects — now Generally Available
Durable Objects are a new and innovative kind of persistent and strongly consistent storage for Cloudflare Workers that has been in open beta since April this year.
As of now, anyone can build with Durable Objects with the confidence that Cloudflare deems the product production ready.
2: wrangler 2.0
→ Cloudflare Blogpost: wrangler 2.0 — a new developer experience for Cloudflare Workers
wrangler is Cloudflare's CLI for interacting with the Cloudflare Workers platform. In my opinion wrangler offers an amazing developer experience.
In this milestone v2.0 release the Cloudflare team has incorporated a whole other tool called Miniflare into wrangler. The addition of Miniflare into wrangler means that by using wrangler 2.0 you can emulate the Cloudflare Workers platform locally - which is amazing.
Other notable improvements in wrangler 2.0 are:
- wrangler can be run without a config
- Live debugging has been made meaningfully easier!
1: Cloudflare Pages Goes Full Stack
→ Cloudflare Blogpost: Cloudflare Pages Goes Full Stack
With this release, Cloudflare is finally showing us how their version of the Vercel/Netlify-like platform is going to look.
Up until now, you could combine Cloudflare Pages and Cloudflare Workers, but you had to stitch them together by yourself. Starting with this release, combining Pages and Workers is incredibly straightforward.
The file-based routing that enables this stitching reveals a great influence of Next.js (and similar frameworks) on this project.
It’s worth noting that the support for preview deployments and Svelte are available immediately with many impactful features still in the pipeline.