Durable Objects Alarms — a wake-up call for your applications

Since we launched Durable Objects, developers have leveraged them as a novel building block for distributed applications.

Durable Objects provide globally unique instances of a JavaScript class a developer writes, accessed via a unique ID. The Durable Object associated with each ID implements some fundamental component of an application — a banking application might have a Durable Object representing each bank account, for example. The bank account object would then expose methods for incrementing a balance, transferring money or any other actions that the application needs to do on the bank account.

Durable Objects work well as a stateful backend for applications — while Workers can instantiate a new instance of your code in any of Cloudflare’s data centers in response to a request, Durable Objects guarantee that all requests for a given Durable Object will reach the same instance on Cloudflare’s network.

Each Durable Object is single-threaded and has access to a stateful storage API, making it easy to build consistent and highly-available distributed applications on top of them.

This system makes distributed systems’ development easier — we’ve seen some impressive applications launched atop Durable Objects, from collaborative whiteboarding tools to conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT) systems for coordinating Continue reading

Live Preview: Build and Test Workers Faster with Wrangler CLI 1.2.0

As part of my internship on the Workers Developer Experience team, I set out to polish the Wrangler CLI for Cloudflare Workers. If you're not familiar with Workers, the premise is quite simple: Write a bit of Javascript that takes in an HTTP request, does some processing, and spits out a response. The magic lies in where your Workers scripts run: on Cloudflare's edge network, which spans 193 cities in more than 90 countries. Workers can be used for nearly anything from configuring Cloudflare caching behavior to building entire serverless web applications. And, you don't have to worry about operations at all.

I was excited to focus on Wrangler, because Wrangler aims to make developing and publishing Workers projects a pleasant experience for everyone, whether you're a solo dev working on the next big thing, or an engineer at a Fortune 100 enterprise. The whole point of serverless is about reducing friction, and Wrangler reflects that ethos.

However, when I started at Cloudflare in early June, some parts of the development experience still needed some love. While working on a new WASM tutorial for the Workers documentation, I noticed a storm brewing in my browser…

Wrangler lets you test your Continue reading