New Workers pricing — never pay to wait on I/O again

Today we are announcing new pricing for Cloudflare Workers and Pages Functions, where you are billed based on CPU time, and never for the idle time that your Worker spends waiting on network requests and other I/O. Unlike other platforms, when you build applications on Workers, you only pay for the compute resources you actually use.

Why is this exciting? To date, all large serverless compute platforms have billed based on how long your function runs — its duration or “wall time”. This is a reflection of a new paradigm built on a leaky abstraction — your code may be neatly packaged up into a “function”, but under the hood there’s a virtual machine (VM). A VM can’t be paused and resumed quickly enough to execute another piece of code while it waits on I/O. So while a typical function might take 100ms to run, it might typically spend only 10ms doing CPU work, like crunching numbers or parsing JSON, with the rest of time spent waiting on I/O.

This status quo has meant that you are billed for this idle time, while nothing is happening.

With this announcement, Cloudflare is the first and only global serverless platform to Continue reading

Partnering with Hugging Face to make deploying AI easier and more affordable than ever 🤗

Today, we’re excited to announce that we are partnering with Hugging Face to make AI models more accessible and affordable than ever before to developers.

There are three things we look forward to making available to developers over the coming months:

1. We’re excited to bring serverless GPU models to Hugging Face — no more wrangling infrastructure or paying for unused capacity. Just pick your model, and go;
2. Bringing popular Hugging Face optimized models to Cloudflare’s model catalog;
3. Introduce Cloudflare integrations as a part of Hugging Face’s Inference solutions.

Hosting over 500,000 models and serving over one million model downloads a day, Hugging Face is the go-to place for developers to add AI to their applications.

Meanwhile, over the past six years at Cloudflare, our goal has been to make it as easy as possible for developers to bring their ideas and applications to life on our developer platform.

As AI has become a critical part of every application, this partnership has felt like a natural match to put tools in the hands of developers to make deploying AI easy and affordable.

“Hugging Face and Cloudflare both share a deep focus on making the latest AI innovations as accessible and affordable Continue reading

The best place on Region: Earth for inference

Today, Cloudflare’s Workers platform is the place over a million developers come to build sophisticated full-stack applications that previously wouldn’t have been possible.

Of course, Workers didn’t start out that way. It started, on a day like today, as a Birthday Week announcement. It may not have had all the bells and whistles that exist today, but if you got to try Workers when it launched, it conjured this feeling: “this is different, and it’s going to change things”. All of a sudden, going from nothing to a fully scalable, global application took seconds, not hours, days, weeks or even months. It was the beginning of a different way to build applications.

If you’ve played with generative AI over the past few months, you may have had a similar feeling. Surveying a few friends and colleagues, our “aha” moments were all a bit different, but the overarching sentiment across the industry at this moment is unanimous — this is different, and it’s going to change things.

Today, we’re excited to make a series of announcements that we believe will make a similar impact as Workers did in the future of computing. Without burying the lede any further, here they Continue reading

Globally distributed AI and a Constellation update

During Cloudflare's 2023 Developer Week, we announced Constellation, a set of APIs that allow everyone to run fast, low-latency inference tasks using pre-trained machine learning/AI models, directly on Cloudflare’s network.

Constellation update

We now have a few thousand accounts onboarded in the Constellation private beta and have been listening to our customer's feedback to evolve and improve the platform. Today, one month after the announcement, we are upgrading Constellation with three new features:

Bigger models
We are increasing the size limit of your models from 10 MB to 50 MB. While still somewhat conservative during the private beta, this new limit opens doors to more pre-trained and optimized models you can use with Constellation.

Tensor caching
When you run a Constellation inference task, you pass multiple tensor objects as inputs, sometimes creating big data payloads. These inputs travel through the wire protocol back and forth when you repeat the same task, even when the input changes from multiple runs are minimal, creating unnecessary network and data parsing overhead.

The client API now supports caching input tensors resulting in even better network latency and faster inference times.

XGBoost runtime
Constellation started with the ONNX runtime, but our vision is to Continue reading

Announcing D1: our first SQL database

We announced Cloudflare Workers in 2017, giving developers access to compute on our network. We were excited about the possibilities this unlocked, but we quickly realized — most real world applications are stateful. Since then, we’ve delivered KV, Durable Objects, and R2, giving developers access to various types of storage.

Today, we're excited to announce D1, our first SQL database.

While the wait on beta access shouldn’t be long — we’ll start letting folks in as early as June (sign up here), we’re excited to share some details of what’s to come.

Meet D1, the database designed for Cloudflare Workers

D1 is built on SQLite. Not only is SQLite the most ubiquitous database in the world, used by billions of devices a day, it’s also the first ever serverless database. Surprised? SQLite was so ahead of its time, it dubbed itself “serverless” before the term gained connotation with cloud services, and originally meant literally “not involving a server”.

Since Workers itself runs between the server and the client, and was inspired by technology built for the client, SQLite seemed like the perfect fit for our first entry into databases.

So what can you build with D1? Continue reading

Announcing Workers for Platforms: making every application on the Internet more programmable

As a business, whether a startup or Fortune 500 company, your number one priority is to make your customers happy and successful with your product. To your customers, however, success and happiness sometimes seems to be just one feature away.

“If only you could customize X, we’ll be able to use your product” - the largest prospect in your pipeline. “If you just let us do Y,  we’ll expand our usage of your product by 10x” - your most strategic existing customer.

You want your product to be everything to everybody, but engineering can only keep up so quickly, so, what gives?

Today, we’re announcing Workers for Platforms, our tool suite to help make any product programmable, and help our customers deliver value to their customers and developers instantaneously.

A more programmable interface

One way to give your customers the ability to programmatically interact with your product is by providing them with APIs. That is a big part of why APIs are so prolific today — enabling code (whether your own, or that of a 3rd party) to engage with your applications is nothing short of revolutionary.

But there’s still a problem. While APIs can give developers the ability Continue reading

The next chapter for Cloudflare Workers: open source

450,000 developers have used Cloudflare Workers since we launched.

When we announced Cloudflare Workers nearly five years ago, we had no idea if we’d ever be in this position. But a lot of care, hard work — not to mention dogfooding — later, we’ve been absolutely blown away by the use cases and applications built on our developer platform, not to mention the community that’s grown around the product.

My job isn’t just speaking to developers who are already using Cloudflare Workers, however. I spend a lot of time talking to developers who aren’t yet using Workers, too. Despite how cool the tech is — the performance, the ability to just code without worrying about anything else like containers, and the total cost advantages — there are two things that cause developers to hesitate in engaging with us on Workers.

The first: they worry about being locked in. No matter how bullish on the technology you are, if you’re betting the future of a company on a development platform, you don’t want the possibility of being held to ransom. And second: as a developer, you want a local development environment to quickly iterate and test your changes. These concerns might Continue reading

Welcome to Platform Week

Principled. It’s one of Cloudflare’s three core values (alongside curiosity and transparency).

It’s a word that we came back to quite a bit in thinking through a question that has been foundational in driving us for this year’s Platform Week: what makes a truly great developer platform?

Of course, when it comes to evaluating developer platforms, the temptation is to focus on the “feeds and speeds” part of the equation. Who is the fastest? Who has the coolest tech? Who lets you do stuff that previously you could not?

Undoubtedly, these are all important questions. But we realized that the fun and shiny things which are often answers to these questions can easily become distractions from the true promise of developing on the Internet — and even traps that the less principled developer platforms can use to lure you into their arms.

The promise being, of course: that you can pull together solutions from a variety of different providers, to build something greater than what you’d be able to do with any one of them alone. That you can build something based on whatever is best when you sit down to create your application. And of course, if something better Continue reading

Welcome to Full Stack Week

As you read this you are using the Internet. Stop and think about that for a minute. We speak about finding something “on the Internet”; we speak about “using the Internet” to perform a task. We essentially never say something like “I'm going to look for this on a server using the Internet as an intermediary between my computer and the server”.

We speak about and think about the Internet as a single, whole entity that we use and rely on. That’s behind the vision of “The Network is the Computer”. What matters is not the component parts that go into “the Internet” but what they come together to create.

That’s also the vision behind Cloudflare’s network.

We don’t want anyone to think about “caching content on a server in a Cloudflare data center” or “writing code that runs on (something called) the edge”. We want you to simply think of it as a single, global network that provides a CDN, a WAF, DDoS protection, Zero Trust and the ability to write infinitely scalable code and have it just work.

Scaling software is hard, and almost no programmer wants to spend their time worrying what will happen if Continue reading

Cloudflare recognized as a ‘Leader’ in The Forrester New Wave for Edge Development Platforms

Forrester’s New Wave for Edge Development Platforms has just been announced. We’re thrilled that they have named Cloudflare a leader (you can download a complimentary copy of the report here).

Since the very beginning, Cloudflare has sought to help developers building on the web, and since the introduction of Workers in 2017, Cloudflare has enabled developers to deploy their applications to the edge itself.

According to the report by Forrester Vice President, Principal Analyst, Jeffrey Hammond, Cloudflare “offers strong compute, data services and web development capabilities. Alongside Workers, Workers KV adds edge data storage. Pages, Stream and Images provide higher level platform services for modern web workloads. Cloudflare has an intuitive developer experience, fast, global deployment of updated code, and minimal cold start times.”

Reimagining development for the modern web

Building on the web has come a long way. The idea that one might have to buy a physical machine in order to build a website seems incomprehensible now. The cloud has played a major role in making it easier for developers to get started. However, since the advent of the cloud, things have stalled — and innovation has become more incremental. That means that while developers Continue reading

Cloudflare Pages is now Generally Available

In December, we announced the beta of Cloudflare Pages: a fast, secure, and free way for frontend developers to build, host, and collaborate on Jamstack sites.

It’s been incredible to see what happens when you put a powerful tool in developers’ hands. In just a few months of beta, thousands of developers have deployed over ten thousand projects, reaching millions of people around the world.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Cloudflare Pages is now available for anyone and ready for your production needs. We’re also excited to show off some of the new features we’ve been working on over the course of the beta, including: web analytics, built in redirects, protected previews, live previews, and optimized images (oh, my!). Lastly, we’ll give you a sneak peek into what we'll be working on next to make Cloudflare Pages your go-to platform for deploying not just static sites, but full-stack applications.

What is Cloudflare Pages?

Cloudflare Pages radically simplifies the process of developing and deploying sites by taking care of all the tedious parts of web development. Now, developers can focus on the fun and creative parts instead.

Seamless builds for developers

Getting started with Cloudflare Pages is as Continue reading

Introducing Cloudflare Pages: the best way to build JAMstack websites

Across multiple cultures around the world, this time of year is a time of celebration and sharing of gifts with the people we care the most about. In that spirit, we thought we'd take this time to give back to the developer community that has been so supportive of Cloudflare for the last 10 years.

Today, we’re excited to announce Cloudflare Pages: a fast, secure and free way to build and host your JAMstack sites.

Today, the path from an idea to a website is paved with good intentions

Websites are the way we express ourselves on the web. It doesn’t matter if you’re a hobbyist with a blog, or the largest of corporations with millions of customers — if you want to reach people outside the confines of 140 280 characters, the web is the place to be.

As a frontend developer, it’s your responsibility to bring this expression to life. And make no mistake — with so many frontend frameworks, tooling, and static site generators at your disposal — it’s a great time to be in your line of work.

That is, of course, right up until the point when you’re ready to show your work off Continue reading

Announcing wrangler dev — the Edge on localhost

Cloudflare Workers — our serverless platform — allows developers around the world to run their applications from our network of 200 datacenters, as close as possible to their users.

A few weeks ago we announced a release candidate for wrangler dev — today, we're excited to take wrangler dev, the world’s first edge-based development environment, to GA with the release of wrangler 1.11.

Think locally, develop globally

It was once assumed that to successfully run an application on the web, one had to go and acquire a server, set it up (in a data center that hopefully you had access to), and then maintain it on an ongoing basis. Luckily for most of us, that assumption was challenged with the emergence of the cloud. The cloud was always assumed to be centralized — large data centers in a single region (“us-east-1”), reserved for compute. The edge? That was for caching static content.

Again, assumptions are being challenged.

Cloudflare Workers is about moving compute from a centralized location to the edge. And it makes sense: if users are distributed all over the globe, why should all of them be routed to us-east-1, on the opposite side of the world, Continue reading

Making magic: Reimagining Developer Experience for the World of Serverless

This week we’ve talked about how Workers provides a step function improvement in the TTFB (time to first byte) of applications, by running lightweight isolates in over 200 cities around the world, free of cold starts. Today I’m going to talk about another metric, one that’s arguably even more important: TTFD, or time to first dopamine, and announce a huge improvement to the Workers development experience — wrangler dev, our edge-based development environment with all the perks of a local environment.

There’s nothing quite like the rush of getting your first few lines of code to work — no matter how many times you’ve done it before, there's something so magical about the computer understanding exactly what you wanted it to do and doing it!

This is the kind of magic I expected of “serverless”, and while it’s true that most serverless offerings today get you to that feeling faster than setting up a virtual server ever would, I still can’t help but be disappointed with how lackluster developing with most serverless platforms is today.

Some of my disappointment can be attributed to the leaky nature of the abstraction: the journey to getting you to the point of writing Continue reading

Helping with COVID-19 Projects: Cloudflare Workers now free through Project Galileo

The Internet has been vital to our response to the COVID-19 crisis: enabling researchers to communicate with the rest of the world, connecting resources with people who need them, and sharing data about the spread.

It’s been amazing to see some of the projects people have stood up on Cloudflare Workers to assist during this crisis. Workers allows you to get set up in minutes, it’s fast and scalable out of the box, and there’s no infrastructure to maintain or scale, which is great if you want to create a project quickly.

To support critical web projects that help in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re giving free access to our Cloudflare Workers compute platform through Project Galileo. We believe sites, apps, APIs, and tools that can help people with COVID-19 are exactly the type of critically important projects that Project Galileo was designed to support.    

Free Cloudflare Workers

One of the earliest impacts of the COVID-19 crisis was the switch that many organizations made to a fully remote model. As that happened, and we realized that many organization’s VPNs were not up to the task of scaling to support this increased load, Cloudflare made Cloudflare for Continue reading

Introducing the HTMLRewriter API to Cloudflare Workers

We are excited to announce that the HTMLRewriter API for Cloudflare Workers is now GA! You can get started today by checking out our documentation, or trying out our tutorial for localizing your site with the HTMLRewriter.

Want to know how it works under the hood? We are excited to tell you everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask, about building a streaming HTML parser on the edge; read about it in part 1 (and stay tuned for part two coming tomorrow!).

Faster, more scalable applications at the edge

The HTMLRewriter can help solve two big problems web developers face today: making changes to the HTML, when they are hard to make at the server level, and making it possible for HTML to live on the edge, closer to the user — without sacrificing dynamic functionality.

Since the introduction of Workers, Workers have helped customers regain control where control either wasn’t provided, or very hard to obtain at the origin level. Just like Workers can help you set CORS headers at the middleware layer, between your users and the origin, the HTMLRewriter can assist with things like URL rewrites (see the example below!).

Back Continue reading

Not so static… Introducing the HTMLRewriter API Beta to Cloudflare Workers

Today, we’re excited to announce HTMLRewriter beta — a streaming HTML parser with an easy to use selector based JavaScript API for DOM manipulation, available in the Cloudflare Workers runtime.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, Cloudflare Workers is a lightweight serverless platform that allows developers to leverage Cloudflare’s network to augment existing applications or create entirely new ones without configuring or maintaining infrastructure.

Static Sites to Dynamic Applications

On Friday we announced Workers Sites: a static site deployment workflow built into the Wrangler CLI tool. Now, paired with the HTML Rewriter API, you can perform DOM transformations on top of your static HTML, right on the Cloudflare edge.

You could previously do this by ingesting the entire body of the response into the Worker, however, that method was prone to introducing a few issues. First, parsing a large file was bound to run into memory or CPU limits. Additionally, it would impact your TTFB as the body could no longer be streamed, and the browser would be prevented from doing any speculative parsing to load subsequent assets.

HTMLRewriter was the missing piece to having your application fully live on the edge – soup to nuts. You can Continue reading

Workers Sites: Deploy Your Website Directly on our Network

Performance on the web has always been a battle against the speed of light — accessing a site from London that is served from Seattle, WA means every single asset request has to travel over seven thousand miles. The first breakthrough in the web performance battle was HTTP/1.1 connection keep-alive and browsers opening multiple connections. The next breakthrough was the CDN, bringing your static assets closer to your end users by caching them in data centers closer to them. Today, with Workers Sites, we’re excited to announce the next big breakthrough — entire sites distributed directly onto the edge of the Internet.

Deploying to the edge of the network

Why isn’t just caching assets sufficient? Yes, caching improves performance, but significant performance improvement comes with a series of headaches. The CDN can make a guess at which assets it should cache, but that is just a guess. Configuring your site for maximum performance has always been an error-prone process, requiring a wide collection of esoteric rules and headers. Even when perfectly configured, almost nothing is cached forever, precious requests still often need to travel all the way to your origin (wherever it may be). Cache invalidation is, after all, Continue reading

Just Write Code: Improving Developer Experience for Cloudflare Workers

We’re excited to announce that starting today, Cloudflare Workers® gets a CLI, new and improved docs, multiple scripts for everyone, the ability to run applications on workers.dev without bringing your own domain, and a free tier to make experimentation easier than ever. We are building the serverless platform of the future, and want you to build your application on it, today. In this post, we’ll elaborate on what a serverless platform of the future looks like, how it changes today’s paradigms, and our commitment to making building on it a great experience.

Three years ago, I was interviewing with Cloudflare for a Solutions Engineering role. As a part of an interview assignment, I had to set up an origin behind Cloudflare on my own  domain. I spent my weekend, frustrated and lost in configurations, trying to figure out how to set up an EC2 instance, connect to it over IPv6, and install NGINX on Ubuntu 16.4 just so I could end up with a static site with a picture of my cat on it. I have a computer science degree, and spent my career up until that point as a software engineer — building this simple app was Continue reading

Announcing workers.dev

We are working really hard to allow you to deploy Workers without having a Cloudflare domain. You will soon be able to deploy your Cloudflare Workers to a subdomain-of-your-choice.workers.dev, which you can go claim now on workers.dev!

Why are we doing this?

You may have read the announcement blog post for Workers (or one of the many tutorials and guest posts), and thought “let me give this a try!”. If you’re an existing Cloudflare customer, you logged into the dashboard, and found a new icon called “Workers”, paid $5 and were on your way. If you’re not, you clicked “Sign Up”, but instead of getting to create and deploy a Worker, we asked you for your domain (if you didn’t have one, we had you register one), and move your nameservers.

Since launch, we have had tons of people who wanted to build a new serverless project from scratch or just try Workers out, but found it difficult to get started. We want to make it easier for anyone to get started building and deploying serverless applications.

How did we get here?

The way you get started on Workers today reflects our journey as a company. Continue reading