Easy Postgres integration on Cloudflare Workers with Neon.tech

It’s no wonder that Postgres is one of the world’s favorite databases. It’s easy to learn, a pleasure to use, and can scale all the way up from your first database in an early-stage startup to the system of record for giant organizations. Postgres has been an integral part of Cloudflare’s journey, so we know this fact well. But when it comes to connecting to Postgres from environments like Cloudflare Workers, there are unfortunately a bunch of challenges, as we mentioned in our Relational Database Connector post.

Neon.tech not only solves these problems; it also has other cool features such as branching databases — being able to branch your database in exactly the same way you branch your code: instant, cheap and completely isolated.

How to use it

It’s easy to get started. Neon’s client library @neondatabase/serverless is a drop-in replacement for node-postgres, the npm pg package with which you may already be familiar. After going through the getting started process to set up your Neon database, you can easily create a Worker to ask Postgres for the current time like so:

1. Create a new Worker — Run npx wrangler init neon-cf-demo and accept all the defaults. Enter Continue reading

Send email using Workers with MailChannels

Here at Cloudflare we often talk about HTTP and related protocols as we work to help build a better Internet. However, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) — used to send emails — is still a massive part of the Internet too.

Even though SMTP is turning 40 years old this year, most businesses still rely on email to validate user accounts, send notifications, announce new features, and more.

Sending an email is simple from a technical standpoint, but getting an email actually delivered to an inbox can be extremely tricky. Because of the enormous amount of spam that is sent every single day, all major email providers are very wary of things like new domains and IP addresses that start sending emails.

That is why we are delighted to announce a partnership with MailChannels. MailChannels has created an email sending service specifically for Cloudflare Workers that removes all the friction associated with sending emails. To use their service, you do not need to validate a domain or create a separate account. MailChannels filters spam before sending out an email, so you can feel safe putting user-submitted content in an email and be confident that it won’t ruin your domain Continue reading

Launching a Startup on Cloudflare Workers

Closing out the Developer Spotlight series for this week is Tejas Mehta who shares how he built his startup, cClip.

cClip is a great tool that allows you to “copy/paste” and transfer files between any of your devices, regardless of what OS they run.

What is so interesting about cClip though is that it is a fully serverless application built on top of Workers and KV, but not exclusively. It uses Firebase for authentication, RevenueCat for a consolidated view over the Apple and Google Play store, and Stripe for all other billing related work.

This is a peek into the future of application development. This is a future where we will be “importing” other SaaS applications as easily as we currently import a package from a package manager. And not only unidirectional by calling APIs on that external application, but bi-directional communication through events with Webhooks.

Here is Tejas telling his story.

The origins of cClip

The abrupt transition to virtual schooling last year led to all my school communications and assignments transitioning online. With a MacBook laptop and an Android phone, submitting my precalculus homework meant I had to take a picture of each page, email each picture to Continue reading

Developer Spotlight: Automating Workflows with Airtable and Cloudflare Workers

Next up on the Developer Spotlight is another favourite of mine. Today’s post is by Jacob Hands. Jacob operates TriTails Premium Beef, which is an online store for meat, a very perishable good. So he has a lot of unique challenges when it comes to shipping. To deal with their growth, Jacob, a developer by trade, turned to Airtable and Cloudflare Workers to automate a lot of their workflow.

One of Jacob’s quotes is one of my favourites:

“Sure, Cloudflare Workers allows you to scale to billions of requests per day, but it is also awesome for a few hundred requests a day.”

Here is Jacob talking about how it only took him a few days to put together a fully customised workflow tool by integrating Airtable and Workers. And how it saves them multiple hours every single day.

Shipping Requirements

Working at a new e-commerce business shipping perishable goods has several challenges as operations scale up. One of our biggest challenges is that daily shipping throughput is limited. Partly because of a small workspace, limiting how many employees can simultaneously pack orders, and also because despite having a requested pickup time with UPS, they often show up Continue reading

Developer Spotlight: Winning a Game Jam with Jamstack and Durable Objects

Welcome to a new blog post series called Developer Spotlight. In this series we will be showcasing interesting applications built on top of the Cloudflare Workers Ecosystem.

And to celebrate Durable Objects going GA, what better to kick off the series than with a really cool tech demo of Durable Objects called Full Tilt?

Full Tilt by Guido Zuidhof is a game jam entry for Ludum Dare, one of the biggest and oldest game jams around, where he won first place in the innovation category. A game jam is like a hackathon for games, where you have a very short amount of time (usually 48-72 hours) to create a game from scratch.

We love Full Tilt, not just because Guido used Workers and Durable Objects to build a cool game where you control a game on your computer via your phone, but especially because it shows how powerful Durable Objects are. In less than 48 hours Guido was able to write all the logic to instantly spin up a personal gaming server anywhere in the world, as close to that player as possible. And it is so fast that you feel like you are controlling the computer directly.

But Continue reading