Cloudflare Workers: Run JavaScript Service Workers at the Edge

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-workers/

by thomseddon • 9 years ago

327 132 9 years ago

blog.cloudflare.com

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Hey all! This is my project at Cloudflare.

(You may remember me as the tech lead of Sandstorm.io and Cap'n Proto.)

Happy to answer questions!

jayrox2• 9 years ago

This is really interesting. I have an idea where this could be helpful to the Plex user community. Recently Plex added a header that blocks the page from being iframed (X-Frame-Options).

Would doing something like this, obviously replacing example.com with their own domain.com, replace the offending header?

  addEventListener('fetch', event => {  
    let request = event.request;
    if (request.headers.has('X-Frame-Options')) {
      let newHeaders = new Headers(request.headers);
      newHeaders.set('X-Frame-Options', 'ALLOW-FROM https://example.com/');
      event.respondWith(fetch(request, {headers: newHeaders}));
    }
  
    // Use default behavior.
    return;
  });

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Yes.

Of course, you could only apply it to your own server.

Also, you would want to think carefully about clickjacking attacks (where someone puts your site in an invisible iframe and tricks people into clicking on it). The X-Frame-Options header was probably added to prevent clickjacking.

jamesrwhite2• 9 years ago

Will there be any limits on memory/execution time etc like with AWS Lambda?

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Yes. Currently you get at most 50ms CPU time per request, and memory usage of your Javascript VM is limited to 128MB. These numbers may change before launch.

In practice, though, a typical script probably uses much less than 1ms of CPU time per request and probably needs only a couple megs of RAM. Because we're applying limits on the level of a V8 Isolate, not on an OS process, the limits go a lot further.

Keep in mind that Cloudflare Workers are not intended to be a place where you do "bulk compute", but rather where you run little bits of code that benefit from being close to users.

lming• 9 years ago

Would Cloudflare endorse VPN services over Service Workers? Sounds like a great option to help people in censored country.

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Policy is not my department, but technically speaking... I think a VPN service would probably be more effective running on AWS or Digital Ocean or whatnot.

aclelland• 9 years ago

Are you able to talk about the pricing structure? Is this going to be per request, total cpu time, etc?

edit. In another reply you said that pricing hasn't been finalised which is understandable. We've got a few use cases which CF Workers would be ideal for but we'd be looking at 10-15k requests per minutes which could get expensive if pricing is per request.

eastdakota2• 9 years ago

We are taking input on what the use cases are in order to come up with a pricing model that makes sense. Definitely reach out with what you're trying to do and we'll take it into account as we're designing how it's priced.

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Oh yeah, BTW: If you're an experienced systems engineer interested in working on a young codebase written in ultra-modern C++, let me know (kenton at cloudflare).

chrismorgan2• 9 years ago

Point of curiosity: why did you go with C++ instead of Rust?

predakanga• 9 years ago

Congratulations on the announce - it seems like a game changer of a feature, and one I look forward to testing.

Will Cloudflare be curating a list of useful worker scripts? I imagine there will be certain usecases that get a lot of attention (e.g. ESI)

Do requests made from the API go through Cloudflare's usual pipeline, or do they go straight to the backend? In short, will we need to manage the cache ourselves?

And finally, does this change Cloudflare's role as a "dumb" intermediary?

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Will Cloudflare be curating a list of useful worker scripts?

Better than that, we plan to unify this with Cloudflare Apps, so people can publish a reusable script as an app, and other people can then "install" that app onto their site with a click.

Do requests made from the API go through Cloudflare's usual pipeline, or do they go straight to the backend? In short, will we need to manage the cache ourselves?

The worker sits in front of the cache, so subrequests made by calling fetch() will go through the usual caching logic.

Eventually we also plan to expose the "Cache" API from standard Service Workers to allow you to manipulate the cache directly for advanced use cases, but this shouldn't be necessary for most people.

And finally, does this change Cloudflare's role as a "dumb" intermediary?

That sounds like a policy question, which isn't my department. ;)

aboodman3• 9 years ago

Hey Kenton, should've guessed you were behind this. Lovely design, great work.

I'd be curious to learn more about the implementation (did you lift the existing SW implementation from blink somehow, or reimplement it)?

aboodman3• 9 years ago

PPS - it is probably too late for this, but one of the last things I worked on at Google was Gin:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/lkgr/gi...

A bindings layer for v8 that was specifically intended to make implementing web-style APIs outside of Blink easier. At the time at least, refactoring things like SW out of Blink was ~impossible.

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Hey Aaron!

I looked a bit at the code in Chrome but determined that it was too attached to Chrome infrastructure that didn't make sense in our use case. Also, there are a lot of parts of Service Workers that don't make any sense outside the browser, so it looked like it would be pretty hairy trying to pull those apart. So, we're building our own implementation (a lot of which is still in-progress, of course).

I actually built a little V8 API binding shim using template and macro metaprogramming that I really like, which allows us to write classes in natural C++ and trivially export them to Javascript. We've been filling in the various non-V8-builtin APIs using this.

We're using libkj's event loop, HTTP library, and other utility code. (KJ is the C++ framework library that is in the process of spinning out of Cap'n Proto. Yeah, I may be suffering NIH, but I think it's worked well.)

gok2• 9 years ago

The blog post mentions WebAssembly support in V8, but I can't get it to work in the playground. Coming later?

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Yes, we intentionally disabled it for now because the WebAssembly API allows dynamic code loading at runtime. We want all code deployed on Cloudflare to go through our standard deployment process so that we have copies of all of it e.g. for forensic purposes. Also, when we integrate with Cloudflare Apps, that code needs to be moderated.

What we'll do at some point is allow you to provide a WASM blob along-side your script, which will be loaded separately and then exposed to your script probably as a global variable.

abritishguy• 9 years ago

Is there any way to store state?

kentonv38• 9 years ago

So, there is the HTTP cache. It turns out a lot of storage use cases are actually answered by the cache. E.g. say you need some lookup table that changes every five minutes -- make it cacheable, max-age=300, and have your worker load it from cache.

Of course, that's not the answer to everything. We don't plan to offer other storage in v1 but we are definitely thinking about it for the future.

vvanders2• 9 years ago

Pretty awesome stuff, will echo that this is one of the cleanest feature pages I've seen.

I'd love to hear more about your evaluation of Lua. LuaJIT is so blazingly fast(and small!) that I'm sure it'd be some pretty significant compute savings.

What sandbox solutions did you look into? Separate lua states, just overriding ENV/setfenv() or something completely different?

kentonv38• 9 years ago

We love Lua and LuaJIT -- we use them extensively here.

But for running third-party code, we need to everything in our power to reduce the risk of a compromise.

Every sandbox (including V8) has bugs, and security is about risk management. With scrutiny, the low-hanging fruit is found and the risk of further bugs steadily decreases. At the end of the day, no Lua sandboxing mechanism has had anywhere near the scrutiny of V8. It's a totally unfair chicken-and-egg problem: to get scrutiny you need usage, but to get usage you need scrutiny. But, it is what it is. :/

richdougherty• 9 years ago

Hi Kenton - awesome new feature!

In the blog post you talk about the trade-offs of using JavaScript vs other options like containers. I thought you might be interested in this comparison of using JavaScript vs other sandboxing options.

https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/22/javascript-for-extending...

Hosts of V8 can multiplex applications by switching between contexts, just as conventional protection is implemented in the OS as process context switches… A V8 context switch is just 8.7% of the cost of a conventional process context switch… V8 will allow more tenants, and it will allow more of them to be active at a time at a lower cost.

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Yes, that sounds like exactly the conclusions we came to. :)

angersock4• 9 years ago

This is really cool...but why?

bpicolo• 9 years ago

The post spends like 15 paragraphs explaining why.

angersock4• 9 years ago

Not helpful, unlike your sibling comments.

tyingq3• 9 years ago

I thought of a few use cases...

A more granular way to block requests than what cloudflare provides (IP, BGP AS, country)

Tokenizing credit cards at the edge if you have a payment provider that supports that, and are using CF's PCI compliant environment.

Injecting a unique ID into requests for log correlation. You get collisions if you do this via browser javascript for various reasons. I'm assuming v8 has a better Math.random(), or that you would at least be able to find a workaround since it's in one stack.

I'm sure there's more.

angersock4• 9 years ago

Also some good use cases. :)

Eridrus• 9 years ago

I worked for an analytics company at one point and we generated impression IDs server side (you'd be surprised how broken client-side JS randomness can be) and included them in our loader. If we had been using CloudFlare I would have put our loader directly into this service worker so that we could shave a few more milliseconds off our intial response time, so that we could get to our cached JS faster.

So yeah, if you care about milliseconds :)

angersock4• 9 years ago

Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks!

Gys• 9 years ago

So in a way this is similar to for example AWS Lambda ? It can process incoming http requests in many ways ? Fascinating idea.

Is there any indication on price level ? And what about runtime duration ?

kentonv38• 9 years ago

It's actually somewhat different. AWS Lambda is intended to act as your origin server. Generally your Lambda functions run in a small number of locations, not necessarily close to users.

Cloudflare Workers will run in all of Cloudflare's 117 (and growing) locations. The idea is that you'd put code in a worker if you need the code to run close to the user. You might want that to improve page load speed, or to reduce bandwidth costs (don't have to pay for the long haul), or because you want to augment Cloudflare's feature set, or a number of other reasons. But, generally, you would not host your whole service on this. (Well, you could, but it's not the intent.)

We haven't nailed down pricing yet, but we've worked hard to create the most efficient possible design so that we can make pricing attractive.

smoll• 9 years ago

So, more like https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/edge/ ?

michaelt• 9 years ago

  We haven't nailed down pricing yet

One of the things I like about AWS is the price doesn't jump from $0/year directly to $240/year the way cloudflare does.

mtrimpe2• 9 years ago

Can I use this together with CloudFlare streaming to open up stream ingestion based on some HMAC signed parameters?

To give regular end-user the rights to e.g. 'record one video of up to X seconds and Y mbps under ID "some-uuid"'

I've been waiting for a proper Content Ingestion Network for ages by now... if the CloudFlare video team ever wants to talk to someone who hand-rolled their own single-node version of this I'd be more than willing to share my experiences.

ddorian43• 9 years ago

How do you store scripts in each edge ? Since in 1 of 117 datacenters, you'll need all scripts from all customers ready to go/execute.

throwaway84736• 9 years ago

Have you guys considered side channels?

Seems like whenever there's co-execution (VMs, JavaScript, etc) there seem to be side channel leakages.

kentonv38• 9 years ago

We're certainly aware of them, but haven't spent a lot of time focused on this issue yet. Of course, the issue exists on all forms of shared compute. So if you're going to do crypto, you'd better make it constant-time. Which is... not easy in Javascript. (But we will provide the WebCrypto API, which might help.)

There is a theoretical solution that we might be able to explore at some point: If compute is deterministic -- that is, always guaranteed to produce the same result given the same input -- then it can't possibly pick up side channels. It's possible to imagine a Javascript engine that is deterministic. The fact that Javascript is single-threaded helps here. In concrete terms, this would mean hooking Date.now() so that it stays constant during continuous execution, only progressing between events.

That said, this is just a theory and there would be lots of details to work out.

SomeStupidPoint2• 9 years ago

There is a theoretical solution that we might be able to explore at some point: If compute is deterministic -- that is, always guaranteed to produce the same result given the same input -- then it can't possibly pick up side channels.

Doesn't this require the timing and interleaving with other processes also be deterministic? ...which seems hard to guarantee with modern CPUs, async IO, and shared execution.

poorman• 9 years ago

Seems like this plus the Cloudflare Apps could yield some interesting projects.

eastdakota2• 9 years ago

Yup. :-)

shallot_router2• 9 years ago

This seems like it has a ton of potential. I'm already thinking of the possibilities for my own Cloudflare-proxied sites.

I hope it's not priced too harshly. Hopefully an added monthly flat rate rather than per-request pricing?

dknecht• 9 years ago

definitely. We plan on exposing the workers to app developers later this year.

tyingq3• 9 years ago

Very nice. Are there plans to expand on it? For example, some way to allow state to be kept at the edge as well.

jgrahamc• 9 years ago

Yes. We plan to. We are releasing this to find out precisely what people need.

pbowyer• 9 years ago

Some way to implement cache tagging and fast invalidation based on tags (a la Fastly) would be good. Without storage I can't see a way to keep a hash of currently valid tags - but I will play!

niftich• 9 years ago

Kudos for re-using an existing API when one was already available in the same language for a very similar usecase.

Any time you commit to someone else's API -- whether it's an actual industry standard, or simply some de facto widely used paradigm -- you incur risks; conversely, now that you're a vested participant, consider being involved in the future of the spec so it can evolve where it needs to meeting emerging needs around its new uses.

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Absolutely! One reason we wanted to get this out in public before it's ready is so we can properly engage with the spec writers (and the V8 team).

That said, I am amazed by how well the spec fits as-is. I don't usually like other people's API designs but in this case I think they did a really good job, and I've been pleased not to have to think about API design myself.

wcdolphin• 9 years ago

Could this be used for HTTP Push across domains? I would love an easy way to take advantage of HTTP Push for assets hosted on S3 without routing requests to my origin server.

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Yes, your worker can make subrequests to other domains, and serving some assets out of S3 is a use case we specifically want to enable.

I haven't looked into how specifically to expose HTTP Push in the API but that certainly seems like something we should support.

spankalee• 9 years ago

Please, add support HTTP/2 push!

This is very, very awesome work. My team has been working on enabling the PRPL pattern[1] and differential serving on a few platforms, and edge caching has been a problem. We've tried to use Vary: User-Agent, but that leads to low cache hits. This API would let us to much smarter UA sniffing at the edge.

From there we just need to parse some responses like JS and HTML, to be able to push their sub-resources, for an instant speedup and great caching for fine-grained deployments.

[1] https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/p...

boundlessdreamz• 9 years ago

offtopic: can cloudflare be used as a CDN for just assets? The cloudflare docs talk only about using it as CDN for an entire site.

shallot_router2• 9 years ago

Technically, yes, but as I understand it, they frown upon it and could potentially terminate your account. See this section of their ToS (https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/):

SECTION 10: LIMITATION ON NON-HTML CACHING
You acknowledge that Cloudflare’s Service is offered as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites and is not offered for other purposes, such as remote storage. Accordingly, you understand and agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of hosting and serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other application and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) protocol or other equivalent technology. Cloudflare’s Service is also a shared web caching service, which means a number of customers’ websites are cached from the same server. To ensure that Cloudflare’s Service is reliable and available for the greatest number of users, a customer’s usage cannot adversely affect the performance of other customers’ sites. Additionally, the purpose of Cloudflare’s Service is to proxy web content, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space, including the storage or caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited. You further agree that if, at Cloudflare’s sole discretion, you are deemed to have violated this section, or if Cloudflare, in its sole discretion, deems it necessary due to excessive burden or potential adverse impact on Cloudflare’s systems, potential adverse impact on other users, server processing power, server memory, abuse controls, or other reasons, Cloudflare may suspend or terminate your account without notice to or liability to you.

I think in practice, unless you have a very popular website or are abusing it in some way, they probably wouldn't care or even notice. But you'd still be taking a gamble.

(I don't work at Cloudflare though so take whatever I say with a grain of salt.)

pilom• 9 years ago

Wow, thanks for that info! Our enterprise account uses CF as a CDN for medium sized (~50MB) video files and I just assumed that they were ok with everyone doing that. I guess not.

I guess the answer for the OP then is, get an enterprise account and you can do whatever you want.

manigandham2• 9 years ago

CDNs dont make a distinction. It's a reverse proxy so any HTTP request can be cached. Cloudflare has a list of standard filetypes supported: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172516-W...

They do have rules on large files though and prefer you use it for typical web content like text and images.

js22• 9 years ago

This is probably the best annoucement of a new feature I have ever read. It makes an analogy to an existing technology. It provides a clear description of the new feature. It provides clear examples of how to use the new feature with a link to a sandbox so you can run and modify the examples. And it explains the thought process behind the implementation. In additon, I didn't notice a single typo, spelling or grammar error.

Also, this feature is pretty cool!

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Daww, thanks!

I wish I'd included more images and diagrams in the post, but I'm generally terrible at coming up with those.

I also wish we'd been able to enable it in production for everyone immediately... but with a change this big we need to be cautious.

konradzikusek• 9 years ago

I didn't notice a single typo

JavaScript is spelled incorrect all over the place.

Awesome feature and post!

kentonv38• 9 years ago

You're right. Fixed.

(I habitually type it "Javascript" but it is indeed supposed to be "JavaScript".)

kempwatson• 9 years ago

That would be "incorrectly".... be careful with criticism.

lima• 9 years ago

You misspelled announcement though. And addition.

Sorry, had to :)

js22• 9 years ago

Phone typos. Too late to fix. Oh well, can’t win them all.

Erwin• 9 years ago

Obligatory transformation of cloud to you-know-what:

https://cloudflareworkers.com/#9bdc354e936c05a4a1d7df7eb0d7f...

JohnDotAwesome2• 9 years ago

https://cloudflareworkers.com/#1f3220d90979ded0b1f5413db0eac... this fixes the styling issues :D

mxuribe• 9 years ago

This is really interesting; kudos to Cloudflare for launching what seems like a cool thing!

Also, agree with other commentators here; nicely-written blog post!

djhworld• 9 years ago

Is this similar to Amazon's Lambda@Edge?

maybeiambatman• 9 years ago

Sounds like it. I think Cloudflare's edge (no pun intended) is going to be their 110+ locations to host this. As opposed to Amazon's 93 I believe? (If all cloudfront spots support lambda@edge that is) https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/details/

eloff2• 9 years ago

I would say at 117 edge locations vs 93 Cloudflare will have lower latency, but most notable in markets that most companies care least about. Probably of more importance is by using embedded V8 as opposed to a process-level sandbox running Node.JS, the Cloudflare service worker will have a much faster startup time in all locations. I seem to recall from tests in Lambda that we're looking at 40-50ms, which is actually substantial given how close these locations often are to the user. But the biggest edge in my books is CloudFront bandwidth is ridiculously expensive and Cloudflare doesn't charge (directly) for bandwidth. Bandwidth often being the single biggest line item in your AWS bill if you get a lot of traffic.

netcraft• 9 years ago

fyi from a different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15365314

manigandham2• 9 years ago

This is fantastic. Fastly is great but hard to use with Varnish VCL, and no other CDN had any real scripting capabilities. The service worker API is also a lot better than serverless cloud functions or lambda@edge.

drdaeman• 9 years ago

Oh my. Is there any form of persistence, present or planned?

If there is - this means that there (eventually) will be a way to have logs from the edge servers. I'm just thinking about a worker that would collect the requests and responses data in some circular buffer, and try to push it to the origin server. Eventually, the data will get through, so no CDN-returned 52x ("web server is not responding" etc) errors would go unnoticed.

kentonv38• 9 years ago

We won't offer writable storage at the edge in v1, but you could always make a background request to push these events back to some log service you maintain (on separate infrastructure from your main service to make simultaneous outages unlikely). Note that you can make background requests that happen after the main response has already returned (but still subject to the per-request CPU limits, etc.).

We're thinking about how to do writable storage, but it's tricky, since one thing we don't want is for developers to have to think about the fact that their code is running in hundreds of locations.

j_s• 9 years ago

Paging HN user johansch from his comment on the Cloudflare Apps mitm JavaScript injection discussion 3 months ago:

johansch: All I want is my code running on your nodes all around the world with an end-to-end ping that is less than 10 ms to the average client

dsl: Akamai Edge Compute is what they are asking for

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650025

ohnoesjmr• 9 years ago

Sounds very cool, but first thing that hit my head: Sounds like a perfect tool to DDoS someone?

kentonv38• 9 years ago

We've thought of that, and it won't be. :)

narsil• 9 years ago

Great product announcement post! I especially liked the Q&A section's reasons for not choosing alternatives.

Is the lack of maturity also the reason for not choosing something like vm2 for NodeJS https://github.com/patriksimek/vm2

kentonv38• 9 years ago

I actually didn't know about that one.

Looking briefly, it looks like it's based on creating separate contexts, but not separate isolates. Contexts within the same isolate can be reasonably secure (it's how Chrome sandboxes iframes from their parent frames, after all), but they still share a single heap and must run on the same thread. Isolates can run on separate threads. We prefer to give each script its own isolate, so that one script using a lot of CPU does not block other scripts. We also want to be able to kill a script that does, say, "while(true) {}".

So yeah, it looks like a neat library but it probably wouldn't suit our needs.

skrebbel• 9 years ago

Sounds like this could be a pretty trivial way to load balance React prerendering. As long as the react code fetches all data in 1 call it should be at least as efficient as doing it all in Nodejs on your server.

JohnDotAwesome2• 9 years ago

Relevant example using Preact https://cloudflareworkers.com/#87ec550da87ab3f7de756a4979c00...

tycho01• 9 years ago

Could this be generalized to work across frameworks with e.g. https://github.com/prerender/prerender?

forcer• 9 years ago

Could this be used to make Cloudflare respond to HTTP POST requests?

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Yep.

    if (request.method == "post") { ... }

peterwwillis2• 9 years ago

  - Is it "Cloudflare Workers" or "Cloudflare Service Workers"?
      A "Cloudflare Worker" is JavaScript you write that runs on Cloudflare's edge.
      A "Cloudflare Service Worker" is specifically a worker which handles
      HTTP traffic and is written against the Service Worker API.

Consufing naming convention. Now you have to say 'worker worker' or 'non-service worker' so nobody has to wonder if you meant 'service worker' when you only said 'worker'.

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Not really, because once there are workers other than Service Workers, they'll have their own names. To be clear, a Service Worker is one kind of Worker. At the moment it's the only kind, but we could introduce others in the future. For instance, maybe we'd introduce a "DNS Worker" that responds to DNS requests.

Also note we didn't invent these terms. "Workers" and "Service Workers" are W3C standards.

peterwwillis2• 9 years ago

Ok. If you're going to have a DNS worker, wouldn't it make more sense to call the http one the HTTP worker? Isn't DNS a service?

polskibus• 9 years ago

I read the article, but I'm not sure what this technology is enabling really. Can it be thought of as a new player in the lambda/serverless category? Does it have any advantages to using other serverless stacks like aws lambda or azure?

superasn• 9 years ago

I guess it's mod_rewrite in js

kentonv38• 9 years ago

The advantage is that the code runs close to your users. 90% of the people on Earth are within 10ms of a Cloudflare location, so by pushing your code out to the edge you can make your site faster. You also save on the cost of transmitting data around the world.

briandear• 9 years ago

Can’t you already do this with Fastly and Varnish?

hdhzy• 9 years ago

This is excellent news! Now I wish AWS Lambda and alternatives also supported Service Worker API (Google Cloud Functions has express like API).

TheAceOfHearts• 9 years ago

This sounds like a really powerful feature. I love how it uses JavaScript, which makes it much more approachable for web developers.

My experience with Service Worker APIs hasn't been very positive, although I don't have any suggestions for ways it could be improved, so I apologize for the non-constructive feedback. Maybe after using it more I'll change my mind. I recognize that everyone involved is likely working hard to provide an API that's capable of handling a wide range of problems, many of which I likely haven't even considered.

Here's a more actionable complaint: fetch doesn't support timeout or abortion. I have a hard time understanding how this isn't a problem for more people. Say what you will about XMLHttpRequest, at least it supports these basic features. As an end-user, I always find it absolutely infuriating when things hang forever because a developer forgot to handle failure cases.

I'd love it if you published a locally runnable version. Aside from making it easier to configure and experiment, it would give me peace of mind to know that I could continue to use the same configuration if Cloudflare decided to terminate my service.

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Abortable fetch actually just recently became a thing, as in the Github issue was closed 9 days ago. More info:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/abortable-...

We'll be implementing soon.

valentinvieriu• 9 years ago

Great addition to your services. I really want to see the pricing. Also I'm quite excited to see how this will play along with the apps concept. Do you plan also to introduce a monetisation system for the apps? It will be a good incentive then for developers to get some nice income.

kentonv38• 9 years ago

As a matter of fact, the monetization part already exists: Cloudflare Apps is a thing today, including paid apps. Today, though, they are limited to injecting client-side code. Once Cloudflare Workers are integrated with Apps, they'll be able to include server-side code too. https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/

PS. There's an investment fund targeting Cloudflare App developers: https://www.cloudflare.com/fund/

renke1• 9 years ago

So, can I use this to do this:

Render your SPA (different index.html) when a login cookie is set and otherwise render your landing page (yet another index.html)? - Such that that my http://example.com can always be cached (unless it needs to hit the server where the same logic is implemented).

And in general, how do you manage your landing page vs. your SPA?

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Yep. At the origin you might serve the SPA as /spa.html and the worker rewrites the URL for people hitting /.

scottmf• 9 years ago

Maybe I’m not quite understanding what you’re asking, but I think you can do this with client side service workers already.

michaelmior• 9 years ago

How will billing work for this? It seems like I could conceivably write an entire application that just runs as a Service Worker.

fowl2• 9 years ago

This is really cool! I wonder if this will become the new "S3 API" and get everyone to copy^H^H^H^H implement it.

Also a little concerned about writing anything substantial without an onprem version!

kentonv38• 9 years ago

Yes, it's my hope that Service Workers will be recognized broadly as the standard API for this.

FWIW I've seen several different folks saying they're working on implementing a Service Workers API shim on top of Node, which would be a great way to get an on-prem version, and should not be very hard to do.

Cloudflare Workers: Run JavaScript Service Workers at the Edge

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