Migrating from Netlify to Cloudflare Workers Sites for 2x Performance (2020)

https://brianli.com/migrating-from-netlify-to-cloudflare-workers-sites-for-2x-performance/

by indigodaddy • 4 years ago

101 65 4 years ago

Jamie9912• 4 years ago

Getting a 403 for some of the assets on that site

ewalk153• 4 years ago

Why use Cloudflare Workers for a Hugo site when they have Pages[1] that is specifically designed for static site build tools like Hugo, Jekyll, etc?

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/framework-guides/dep...

rmbyrro4• 4 years ago

Seems CloudFlare is really becoming a jack of all trades, which is cool because they are more and more a [developer friendly] replacement for those big cloud providers.

BeefWellington• 4 years ago

more and more a [developer friendly] replacement for those big cloud providers.

They ARE a big cloud provider.

PinkPigeon• 4 years ago

Pages doesn't allow for direct deployments. Has to go via git repo + webhooks. We make static sites with our CMS and don't really want to integrate another thing into our workflow. Lots of CF and git API calls to automate the whole thing reliably. Thus, we're sticking with workers sites for now. Pages is an attractive offering, however.

barake• 4 years ago

Yeah, the totally managed deployment for Pages is great to get started, but not being able to run through our regular CI tool is a major bummer and has us also sticking with Worker sites.

kenrose• 4 years ago

This post was written in 2020 before Cloudflare Pages was launched.

Presumably Pages was created because they saw a lot of people using Workers and KV for this use case.

bastawhiz2• 4 years ago

Exactly: if the author had waited another four months, they would have been able to save themselves a lot of trouble.

abiro• 4 years ago

Does CF Pages support atomic deployments yet?

pwdisswordfish9• 4 years ago

Cloudflare Pages is hardcoded to GitHub (rather than just Git).

colesantiago• 4 years ago

When you deploy a site using Cloudflare Workers Sites, the entire Cloudflare network, with over 150 data centers around the world, effectively becomes your origin server. In comparison, Netlify’s global CDN only conists of 6 locations for free users and 12 locations for enterprise plans.

I don't understand the value (or hype) of Netlify if Cloudflare has many PoP (Points of Presences) and is effectively way faster.

Netlify looking similarly like an expensive Heroku (more PoP only on enterprise plans) which doesn't seem like a global network to me.

Curious to know is anyone on Netlify considering moving or staying?

ignoramous• 4 years ago

Netlify has way more deployment knobs and integrations, but Cloudflare Pages (and not Workers Sites) is quickly catching up in that regard.

joao• 4 years ago

One of the few grips I have with the more recent Cloudflare Pages is that the build times sometimes are 10x slower than Netlify.

If you need to perform a fast update or rollback, it does take its time.

squaresmile• 4 years ago

Using Github Actions, Worker Sites and the CF worker, I think the level of customization is quite high without too much work.

For example, our hobby React SPA deploys on merge using Actions. It also has dynamic opengraph tags for pretty Discord embeds using CF worker.

imachine1980_• 4 years ago

Netlify is the best for static site hosting you can buy, cloudlflare page have unlimited data and free analytics but for in general, netlify have you cover whit more complete and mature implementations like cms

rmbyrro4• 4 years ago

Especially, getting their support service is quite expensive. For a side-project or personal blog we can get away without support, but a commercial application wouldn't be advisable.

viraptor5• 4 years ago

I've done some migrations and there's no perfect solution. Currently I'm split between netlify and vercel. The downsides I know for each:

- Netlify doesn't support Range headers which means you can't host clickonce installers for windows apps there

- Vercel doesn't support IPv6 which really is table stakes these days

- S3 + CloudFront are very low-level and the bandwidth is expensive

- CloudFlare supports targeted harassment so dropped for moral reasons

opendomain• 4 years ago

can anyone explain "CloudFlare supports targeted harassment"?

cute_boi• 4 years ago

Can you please explicate your last point?

I don't know about first two but S3 or CloudFront is from Amazon which certainly have too many blemishes. Also, AFAIK Cloudflare is an infrastructure provider so, I wonder why would ethics come here.

Are we going to blame Google for making a browser that is used for hundreds of immoral things?

The only reason I think one will disdain over Cloudflare is due to monopoly. And, many argue they do some DDOS attack, but I have never seen any modicum of evidence.

johnnypangs• 4 years ago

Hey do you have any more information on cloudflare supporting targeted harassment? I had t heard of it.

hunter2_• 4 years ago

What are the practical implications of not supporting IPv6? Does it make for longer loading times on devices that only natively have IPv6 which I believe includes most cellular devices?

perplex• 4 years ago

CloudFront is only more expensive for the first 400GB. Netlify's bandwidth is $0.20/GB after the 400GB mark compared to CloudFront's $0.085/GB.

trinovantes• 4 years ago

I don't know how much other FaaS have changed over the years but I really like CF Workers because it provides a local test server with live reload from my command line by simply running "wrangler dev" instead of pushing my code to a git repo or pasting changes into a web GUI.

rmbyrro4• 4 years ago

Great post and tutorial. I wonder how performance would compare with an AWS S3 + CloudFront deployment.

miyuru• 4 years ago

The tradition of yearly blog host migration.

The blog is on Vercel now.

$ dig brianli.com @dns.google +short

76.76.21.21

(76.76.21.21 is Vercel's vanity IPv4 address)

jve• 4 years ago

https://brianli.com/2020/12/hosting-on-cloudflare-workers-si...

aarondf• 4 years ago

Where are the images stored in a setup like this?

aeyes• 4 years ago

You could use Cloudflare R2 if you already are on Cloudflare.

samhw4• 4 years ago

R2 doesn't exist yet: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/r2-storage/ (And, more importantly, it's not very clear when it will exist.)

mritzmann• 4 years ago

This blogpost is from 2020. It seems that the author has since migrated the site to Vercel. It would be interesting to know why he has now chosen Vercel.

  $ dig +short brianli.com
  76.76.21.21
  
  $ whois 76.76.21.21 | grep OrgName  
  OrgName:        Vercel, Inc

bla3• 4 years ago

https://brianli.com/2020/12/hosting-on-cloudflare-workers-si...

fulafel• 4 years ago

TLDR; He dual hosted on CloudFlare & Vercel for redundancy, then CloudFlare had an outage. Doesn't say if he dropped CF altogether after that or what.

pictur• 4 years ago

lol

ctvo• 4 years ago

Long story short, it turns out that Workers KV also works for storing static sites generated by Hugo, Gatsby, and other SSGs. This makes complete sense if you think about it. When you access a static site, you point your browser to a unique URL, and the server returns a pre-generated static HTML file. In this model, the URL is the “key” and the contents of the HTML file is the “value”. Thus, a static site can be stored in a key-value data store like Workers KV.

Why not just use Cloudflare's standard CDN? It makes no sense. By this logic, a file system is a perfect key value store, because ya know, the key is the full path and the file is the value.

pjc50• 4 years ago

By this logic, a file system is a perfect key value store, because ya know, the key is the full path and the file is the value.

They're not wrong.

I'm still waiting for people to rediscover (fast)cgi as the "worker" interface.

afiori5• 4 years ago

cloudflare and others workers are almost literally fastcgi for javascript.

The problem is that node is not a good cgi engine.

poisonborz• 4 years ago

Purely anecdotical, but moving to almost anywhere from Netlify (free tier) results in a major performance boost. A simple static site of mine went from 300ms to 80ms when I eventually transferred it to a cheap ssd webhost. Sure, free service, but know the strings attached.

jamil7• 4 years ago

Also anecdotal but I've also had the unpleasant experience of them suspending an account on the free tier through some automated system (still not 100% why, they didn't respond to our email). Account suspension results in all your sites getting immediately taken down without warning, if you host DNS there that also gets taken down. I wasn't hosting anything critical there so not a huge deal for me but I will never recommend them for anything serious.

bilater• 4 years ago

Nice - I'd be interested to hear about cases where sites that are not just static have been migrated over. Those really are the big use cases.

For example can you move a Next.js site that leverages Incremental Static Generation to Cloudflare. I wonder if ISR is even possible out of the box without you having to setup complicated caching logic anywhere besides Netlify and Vercel.

roneythomas6• 4 years ago

I host bunch static sites and have done benchmarks around TFTB and general network performance. Netlify is fast and most people won't notice much difference since the web page will be cached after the first visit.

Cloudflare is faster, you also get http3 over http2. Also Cloudflare has much better peering around the globe. When I do traceroute it's fewer hops compared to Netlify. I have tried vercel but haven't tested it extensively they use AWS and Cloudfront. If you use Github pages or Firebase hosting they both use Fastly. Fastly is also really good, in certain regions Fastly has better peering with ISP over Cloudflare. At Least where I am located Fastly is faster, but both Github pages and Firebase hosting doesn't have support for http3. On a fast network between h2 and h3 you won't find much difference. On a unstable or slow network h3 makes a big difference.

MaxLeiter• 4 years ago

Anecdotal, but I'm looking into migrating one of my projects websites to Vercel from Netlify (which it seems like the author ultimately did).

Vercel deployed in 3 minutes and is 2-4x as fast to load for me: https://thelounge-github-io-jwd9o31su-mleiter.vercel.app/

versus 7 minutes building/deploying on netlify: https://deploy-preview-259--thelounge.netlify.app/

Migrating from Netlify to Cloudflare Workers Sites for 2x Performance (2020)

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