I love that pretty much all the JS runtimes have settled on `(Request): Response`[0], but I really wish they would standardize starting the server as well. Would make writing cross-runtime services easier.
I wonder where the pattern first comes from? I think I either came across it in Express (JS) or Ring (Clojure) first but surely it was first done somewhere else.
They're close to as cheap as they come for CDN bandwidth list prices without minimums, especially for CDNs with their level of global coverage. Competitors in this space in particular are often much more expensive, like Deno Deploy's $0.50/GB.
Cloudflare is effectively impossible to compare because it's all "free until you get an email from sales".
Supabase Edge Runtime is easy to self-host (works great as a multi-threaded JS web server). We love community contributions :) Let us know if you would like to collaborate.
I can vouch for Bunny. They are a fantastic company with fantastic prices and fantastic reliability. I have used their CDNs and all of their products for more than 4-5 years now.
Same here. Bunny CDN plus Wasabi. It’s an excellent, inexpensive duo. Bunnny now has their own Object storage, but it wasn’t mature in time for me to. Hold around it a few years back.
Completely agree. We migrated our entire video library from Azure to Bunny. We went from paying over $2,500 in egress every month to about $200. It’s unreal how much Bunny has saved us.
Wouldn't running on the edge of the internet mean running on the devices that I see when I look around my house? It feel like this serverless thing is rather serverful, unless I've overlooked the part where users are running a node somewhere.
I guess edge is just a buzzword, maybe it is like a metaphor; if you think of the internet as a sphere users reach to for content, something being on the edge means you don't have to reach that hard, it's right there on top. Or maybe it means close to the edge, close to end-user devices.
Serverless is definitely a misnomer, but it means that you don't 'own' the server your thing is running on, there are some restrictions and you can't run anything you could on an actual VPS or hardware box. So in a way the server is abstracted away. You just use resources, but those could be anywhere, running on any node of the edge network.
Right after CenturyLink rebranded to Lumen, but before I heard about it, I clicked a buzzword-laden link looking for people involved in "Edge Computing". I had been writing vehicle traffic controller firmware and thought "hey, I guess I'm doing edge computing--out here at the curb--maybe I should check this out."
Turns out, they meant installing modems in people's houses. Edge, it would seem, is a very versatile buzzword.
I feel like Edge is more acceptable; running at a PoP is close to the edge; running inside an ISP network is even closer; it's not really achievable, but running in ISP managed modems or cellular base stations is pretty much the limit of plausible Edge computing.
Serverless really should mean the client does the work, but it seems pretty equivalent to shared hosting. Dreamhost (and the shell account you used to get with an ISP!) was serverless before it was cool?
I think of it as the edge of the server side, ie the closest to the user where the service operator still controls the data. An edge function in a data center can hide information from unauthorized users. An edge function in a home would have a much harder time of pulling that off.
Why design your own API so that I can't try it without rewriting my entrypoints? No thanks.
Cloudflare is building an insanely good platform and I think it is one that is worth betting on into the future. I have no idea where this company came from. Maybe it's a rebrand, because they seem to have serious customer base and perhaps network footprint.
PoPs are ~119 which is significantly fewer (less than half) of Cloudflare's presence, and Cloudflare has queueing, streaming, D1 (databasing), R2, and all sorts of other things. Workers' DX cannot be beaten.
Just my 2c. If the creators are here, I'd love to know why you decided to design a new API. That is so upsetting.
Bunny has been around for much longer than CloudFlare. All those third party video streaming websites (e.g. adult content) all rely on CDNs like these. Bandwidth is very cheap. CloudFlare is able to command their prices mostly because of the security features and the fact that they are a pull based CDN. Most of the internet outside of SaaS rely on traditional CDNs like Bunny for low cost distribution.
Did they undergo a rebrand? Did I just miss this company for many years (it's possible)? I'm happy to believe you. But when you say "traditional CDNs," I think Akamai.
> Cloudflare doesn't execute workers in all their PoPs.
Yes we do!
> I'm in central Mexico and my workers execute in DFW even though there's a Cloudflare PoP not even 30 mins away from here (QRO).
I think you will find that even if you turned off Workers, your site would still be routed to DFW. Some of our colos don't have enough capacity to serve all traffic in their local region, so we selectively serve a subset of sites from that colo and reroute others to a bigger colo further away. There are a lot of factors that go into the routing decision but generally sites on the free plan or lower plan levels are more likely to be rerouted. In any case, the routing has absolutely nothing to do with whether you are using Workers. Every single machine in our edge network runs Workers and is prepared to serve traffic for any site, should that traffic get routed there.
(Additionally, sometimes ISP network connectivity doesn't map to geography like you'd think. It's entirely possible that your ISP has better connectivity to our DFW location than the QRO location.)
Cloudflare DX is garbage. It has improved a bit in the last year but it's very far from being usable by your average developer. I am building a product on workers and I am questioning that decision every other day.
Are you doing it on Rust? TypeScript with Workers is a dream. Consider that, while it is not yet fully mature, you can build and launch your app once and it is global-first. It costs like $100 or less to run at significant scale. It's a dream.
I think it's pretty good, but yeah, not ideal. I'm also building a product on workers, and using D1, KV, R2, queues, and am pretty happy with the DX. Running remote previews is pretty neat.
Cloudflare had only 100 PoPs just a few years ago. Bunny has been around 10 years, but didn't get the cash injection from Google like Cloudflare did.
If you read the article, Bunny uses Deno, CF uses a cut down version of Chromeium (each instance is like a browser tab; isolated). Thus the API difference.
But I do agree, CF is building out more of a suite.
WorkerD isn't anywhere near a "cutdown version of Chromium," it is an incredible platform with years of engineering put into it, from some of the people behind very similar and successful products (GAE, Protocol Buffers, to name some). I assume you are referring to V8 here but that also powers Deno.
> We've all been there: your app gains popularity, and suddenly, you're scrambling to add new servers.
Yeah, but the headache is usually from database, cache and other shared resource servers.
Scaling HTTP has been very easy for most applications for the last 15 years or so.
I have to confess I really don't see the appeal of edge workers in general outside of specific applications where latency is of high concern. Such applications do exist, of course, but this kind of offering is treated so generally that I feel like I'm either immune to the marketing or I'm missing something important.
> I have to confess I really don't see the appeal of edge workers in general outside of specific applications where latency is of high concern. Such applications do exist, of course, but this kind of offering is treated so generally that I feel like I'm either immune to the marketing or I'm missing something important.
Oh, there are lots of things you can do 'on edge' that can be easier/faster:
+ A/B testing
+ cookie warnings just for EU but not everyone else
+ proxy; helpful if you want to hide where your API is from or username/pass
+ route redirects
+ take off some workload from your server
+ mini applets (eg signup forms are great edge use-case)
Readit News
[0]: https://blog.val.town/blog/the-api-we-forgot-to-name/
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Seems pretty good on paper. There's no free allowance like you get with Workers though.
Another positive side effect would be to have paid dual redundancy then too.
Backblaze is another neighbour that plays nice with bunny.
Cloudflare is effectively impossible to compare because it's all "free until you get an email from sales".
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I lead Supabase Edge Functions product, a similar offering built on top of Deno runtime too. We have open-sourced our runtime (https://github.com/supabase/edge-runtime), and it's self-hostable. It supports NPM, node built-ins, pluggable storage, and web sockets. We also have a built-in API for AI inference (https://supabase.com/blog/ai-inference-now-available-in-supa...)
Supabase Edge Runtime is easy to self-host (works great as a multi-threaded JS web server). We love community contributions :) Let us know if you would like to collaborate.
These days "edge" more commonly refers to the "edge of the cloud", i.e. still a datacenter, just not in us-east-1.
Serverless also does not mean no servers, it means no sysadmins.
Serverless is definitely a misnomer, but it means that you don't 'own' the server your thing is running on, there are some restrictions and you can't run anything you could on an actual VPS or hardware box. So in a way the server is abstracted away. You just use resources, but those could be anywhere, running on any node of the edge network.
Turns out, they meant installing modems in people's houses. Edge, it would seem, is a very versatile buzzword.
Serverless really should mean the client does the work, but it seems pretty equivalent to shared hosting. Dreamhost (and the shell account you used to get with an ISP!) was serverless before it was cool?
Cloudflare is building an insanely good platform and I think it is one that is worth betting on into the future. I have no idea where this company came from. Maybe it's a rebrand, because they seem to have serious customer base and perhaps network footprint.
PoPs are ~119 which is significantly fewer (less than half) of Cloudflare's presence, and Cloudflare has queueing, streaming, D1 (databasing), R2, and all sorts of other things. Workers' DX cannot be beaten.
Just my 2c. If the creators are here, I'd love to know why you decided to design a new API. That is so upsetting.
Cloudflare doesn't execute workers in all their PoPs.
I'm in central Mexico and my workers execute in DFW even though there's a Cloudflare PoP not even 30 mins away from here (QRO).
Yes we do!
> I'm in central Mexico and my workers execute in DFW even though there's a Cloudflare PoP not even 30 mins away from here (QRO).
I think you will find that even if you turned off Workers, your site would still be routed to DFW. Some of our colos don't have enough capacity to serve all traffic in their local region, so we selectively serve a subset of sites from that colo and reroute others to a bigger colo further away. There are a lot of factors that go into the routing decision but generally sites on the free plan or lower plan levels are more likely to be rerouted. In any case, the routing has absolutely nothing to do with whether you are using Workers. Every single machine in our edge network runs Workers and is prepared to serve traffic for any site, should that traffic get routed there.
(Additionally, sometimes ISP network connectivity doesn't map to geography like you'd think. It's entirely possible that your ISP has better connectivity to our DFW location than the QRO location.)
I think it's pretty good, but yeah, not ideal. I'm also building a product on workers, and using D1, KV, R2, queues, and am pretty happy with the DX. Running remote previews is pretty neat.
If you read the article, Bunny uses Deno, CF uses a cut down version of Chromeium (each instance is like a browser tab; isolated). Thus the API difference.
But I do agree, CF is building out more of a suite.
WorkerD is open source: https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
I personally am not a fan of Deno because of how it split the Node JS ecosystem, so that is not a benefit in my eyes. Of course, Workers can run Rust.
Nothing you said here necessitates an API difference.
Yeah, but the headache is usually from database, cache and other shared resource servers.
Scaling HTTP has been very easy for most applications for the last 15 years or so.
I have to confess I really don't see the appeal of edge workers in general outside of specific applications where latency is of high concern. Such applications do exist, of course, but this kind of offering is treated so generally that I feel like I'm either immune to the marketing or I'm missing something important.
I agree, it mostly seems like a fad/gimmick.
+ A/B testing + cookie warnings just for EU but not everyone else + proxy; helpful if you want to hide where your API is from or username/pass + route redirects + take off some workload from your server + mini applets (eg signup forms are great edge use-case)
ref: this is my old repo: https://github.com/lukeed/awesome-cloudflare-workers