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Improving Workers TypeScript support: accuracy, ergonomics and interoperability

TypeScript makes it easy for developers to write code that doesn’t crash, by catching type errors before your program runs. We want developers to take advantage of this tooling, which is why one year ago, we built a system to automatically generate TypeScript types for the Cloudflare Workers runtime. This enabled developers to see code completions in their IDEs for Workers APIs, and to type check code before deploying. Each week, a new version of the types would be published, reflecting the most recent changes.

Over the past year, we’ve received lots of feedback from customers and internal teams on how we could improve our types. With the switch to the Bazel build system in preparation for open-sourcing the runtime, we saw an opportunity to rebuild our types to be more accurate, easier to use, and simpler to generate. Today, we’re excited to announce the next major release of @cloudflare/workers-types with a bunch of new features, and the open-sourcing of the fully-rewritten automatic generation scripts.

How to use TypeScript with Workers

Setting up TypeScript in Workers is easy! If you’re just getting started with Workers, install Node.js, then run npx wrangler init in your terminal to Continue reading

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Doubling down on local development with Workers: Miniflare meets workerd

Local development gives you a fully-controllable and easy-to-debug testing environment. At the start of this year, we brought this experience to Workers developers by launching Miniflare 2.0: a local Cloudflare Workers simulator. Miniflare 2 came with features like step-through debugging support, detailed console.logs, pretty source-mapped error pages, live reload and a highly-configurable unit testing environment. Not only that, but we also incorporated Miniflare into Wrangler, our Workers CLI, to enable wrangler dev’s --local mode.

Today, we’re taking local development to the next level! In addition to introducing new support for migrating existing projects to your local development environment, we're making it easier to work with your remote data—locally! Most importantly, we're releasing a much more accurate Miniflare 3, powered by the recently open-sourced workerd runtime—the same runtime used by Cloudflare Workers!

Enabling local development with workerd

One of the superpowers of having a local development environment is that you can test changes without affecting users in production. A great local environment offers a level of fidelity on par with production.

The way we originally approached local development was with Miniflare 2, which reimplemented Workers runtime APIs in JavaScript. Unfortunately, there were subtle behavior Continue reading

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How Cloudflare instruments services using Workers Analytics Engine

Workers Analytics Engine is a new tool, announced earlier this year, that enables developers and product teams to build time series analytics about anything, with high dimensionality, high cardinality, and effortless scaling. We built Analytics Engine for teams to gain insights into their code running in Workers, provide analytics to end customers, or even build usage based billing.

In this blog post we’re going to tell you about how we use Analytics Engine to build Analytics Engine. We’ve instrumented our own Analytics Engine SQL API using Analytics Engine itself and use this data to find bugs and prioritize new product features. We hope this serves as inspiration for other teams who are looking for ways to instrument their own products and gather feedback.

Why do we need Analytics Engine?

Analytics Engine enables you to generate events (or “data points”) from Workers with just a few lines of code. Using the GraphQL or SQL API, you can query these events and create useful insights about the business or technology stack. For more about how to get started using Analytics Engine, check out our developer docs.

Since we released the Analytics Engine open beta in September, we’ve been adding new Continue reading

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How to use the whatis command

In this Linux tip, we’re going to look at the whatis command. It’s a helpful command that will give you a one-line description of any command that you ask about.

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Video: Exposing Kubernetes Services to External Clients

After a brief introduction of Kubernetes service and an overview of services types, Stuart Charlton added the last missing bit: how do you expose Kubernetes services to external clients.

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Video: Exposing Kubernetes Services to External Clients

After a brief introduction of Kubernetes service and an overview of services types, Stuart Charlton added the last missing bit: how do you expose Kubernetes services to external clients.

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Datacenter Can Carry Nvidia Through The Rough Spots

After a decade and a half of ceaseless and focused work, Nvidia has created a modern compute platform, and a unique one at that. …

Datacenter Can Carry Nvidia Through The Rough Spots was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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SC22 SCinet network monitoring

The data shown in the chart was gathered from The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC22) being held this week in Dallas. The conference network, SCinet, is described as the fastest and most powerful network on Earth, connecting the SC community to the world. The chart provides an up to the second view of overall SCinet traffic, the lower chart showing total traffic hitting a sustained 8Tbps. The poster shows the topology of the SCinet network. Monitoring flow data from 5,852 switch/router ports with 162Tbps total bandwith with sub-second latency is required to construct the charts.The chart was generated using industry standard streaming sFlow telemetry from switches and routers in the SCinet network. An instance of the sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine computes the flow metrics shown in the charts. Most of the load was due to large 400Gbit/s, 200Gbit/s and 100Gbit/s flows that were part of the Network Research Exhibition. The chart above shows that 10 large flows are responsible for 1.5Tbps of traffic.Scientific network tags (scitags) describes how IPv6 flowlabels allow network flow analytics to identify network traffic associated with bulk scientific data transfers.RDMA network visibility shows how bulk Continue reading

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Accelerating Digital Transformation with Automation APIs

Making use of standardized APIs, such as those offered by MEF, allow you to “invest once” and scale with multiple providers and services.

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IPv6 Buzz 114: Another Listener Questions Episode!

Today's IPv6 Buzz episode answers listener questions about Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) and auto-addressing, privacy and IPv6, and where NAT46 fits in.

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IPv6 Buzz 114: Another Listener Questions Episode!

Today's IPv6 Buzz episode answers listener questions about Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) and auto-addressing, privacy and IPv6, and where NAT46 fits in.

The post IPv6 Buzz 114: Another Listener Questions Episode! appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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EVPN-VXLAN Video 2, Aruba Airheads and that bird app

In this post:

🎬 EVPN-VXLAN Explainer 2
🧡 My experience at the Aruba Airheads Netherlands event
🥀 Going off Twitter and joining Mastodon

🎬 EVPN-VXLAN Explainer 2

Hot of the presses, well, iMovie rendering, here is the latest EVPN-VXLAN Explainer video:

This one covers how BGP peers build an EVPN session, with the AFI/SAFI in a BGP OPEN. Plus there's a config demo and some packet captures in there, showing a BGP OPEN 'in the wild'.
Check it out and let me know what you think.

🇳🇱 Airheads Netherlands

A couple of weeks ago, I presented a couple of sessions at the Aruba Airheads event in NL, just outside Utrecht.
☝️ My first session was on Aruba Central NetConductor, Aruba's all-encompassing architecture; that unifies wired and wireless networking with a strong focus on security and management.
That went well, and my live demo, as much as I got to show in the timeslot, was a success.
The big challenge with that type of presentation, because it isn't a single product or service, but an architecture and design approach; is to answer the question 'what is it?'. I'm not a fan of marketing at all, so I always attempt to Continue reading

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Spice up your sites on Cloudflare Pages with Pages Functions General Availability

Before we launched Pages back in April 2021, we knew it would be the start of something magical – an experience that felt “just right”. We envisioned an experience so simple yet so smooth that any developer could ship a website in seconds and add more to it by using the rest of our Cloudflare ecosystem.

A few months later, when we announced that Pages was a full stack platform in November 2021, that vision became a reality. Creating a development platform for just static sites was not the end of our Pages story, and with Cloudflare Workers already a part of our ecosystem, we knew we were sitting on untapped potential. With the introduction of Pages Functions, we empowered developers to take any static site and easily add in dynamic content with the power of Cloudflare Workers.

In the last year since Functions has been in open beta, we dove into an exploration on what kinds of full stack capabilities developers are looking for on their projects – and set out to fine tune the Functions experience into what it is today.

We’re thrilled to announce that Pages Functions is now generally available!

Functions recap

Though called “Functions” in Continue reading

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Incremental adoption of micro-frontends with Cloudflare Workers

Bring micro-frontend benefits to legacy Web applications

Recently, we wrote about a new fragment architecture for building Web applications that is fast, cost-effective, and scales to the largest projects, while enabling a fast iteration cycle. The approach uses multiple collaborating Cloudflare Workers to render and stream micro-frontends into an application that is interactive faster than traditional client-side approaches, leading to better user experience and SEO scores.

This approach is great if you are starting a new project or have the capacity to rewrite your current application from scratch. But in reality most projects are too large to be rebuilt from scratch and can adopt architectural changes only in an incremental way.

In this post we propose a way to replace only selected parts of a legacy client-side rendered application with server-side rendered fragments. The result is an application where the most important views are interactive sooner, can be developed independently, and receive all the benefits of the micro-frontend approach, while avoiding large rewrites of the legacy codebase. This approach is framework-agnostic; in this post we demonstrate fragments built with React, Qwik, and SolidJS.

The pain of large frontend applications

Many large frontend applications developed today fail to deliver good user Continue reading

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Announcing the first Workers Launchpad cohort and growth of the program to $2 billion

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語, 한국어, Deutsch, Français, Español.

During Birthday Week 2022, we announced a $1.25 billion funding program for startups building on our developer platform, Cloudflare Workers. This was done in partnership with 26 leading VC firms who have been investing in or seeking to invest in Workers-based startups.

Today, we’re excited to reveal the first cohort of Launchpad Startups as well as 14 additional VC partners, bringing the Launchpad to $2 billion in potential funding from 40 VC firms in total.

Who are our new VC partners?

We are excited to welcome 14 additional firms to the Workers Launchpad, which you can find included in the image below. They have worked with hundreds of companies that have grown to become leaders in their areas including Asana, Canva, Figma, Netlify, Vercel, Area 1 Security (which Cloudflare acquired in 2022), and many others. Notably, they also represent a diverse group of investors who support startups across North and South America, Europe, and Asia.

Many of these investors have seen the competitive advantages of building on Workers through their own portfolio companies firsthand and are looking forward to providing the Continue reading

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How we built it: the technology behind Cloudflare Radar 2.0

Radar 2.0 was built on the learnings of Radar 1.0 and was launched last month during Cloudflare's Birthday Week as a complete product revamp. We wanted to make it easier for our users to find insights and navigate our data, and overall provide a better and faster user experience.

We're building a Supercloud. Cloudflare's products now include hundreds of features in networking, security, access controls, computing, storage, and more.

This blog will explain how we built the new Radar from an engineering perspective. We wanted to do this to demonstrate that anyone could build a somewhat complex website that involves demanding requirements and multiple architectural layers, do it on top of our stack, and how easy it can be.

Hopefully, this will inspire other developers to switch from traditional software architectures and build their applications using modern, more efficient technologies.

High level architecture

The following diagram is a birds-eye view of the Radar 2.0 architecture. As you can see, it's divided into three main layers:

• The Core layer is where we keep our data lake, data exploration tools, and backend API.
• The Cloudflare network layer is where we host and run Radar and serve the public APIs.
• Continue reading

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Server-side render full stack applications with Pages Functions

Pages Functions are now out of beta and generally available, bringing dynamic computation within 50ms of 95% of users globally. Built on top of Cloudflare Workers, Pages projects are easy to deploy and instantly benefit from this low latency, with over 275 data centers across the globe.

With Page Functions comes the ability to add dynamic server-side rendering to your applications. Pages makes it easy to deploy applications built using all the major meta-frameworks such as Astro, Next.js, Qwik, Remix, Solid, and Svelte. There is no better time to start deploying your server-side rendered full-stack applications to Cloudflare Pages.

Go server-side with Pages Functions

When Pages launched in December 2020, it was focused on being a high-performance host for static assets. Pages was a perfect choice for anyone building websites which could be generated ahead of time with static site generation. Jamstack was all the rage, and Cloudflare's network was an excellent choice for its ability to serve static files to visitors from around the globe.

Once deployed the files would be effortlessly hosted and served at incredible speeds across the world to your users. These statically generated applications can run client-side code in the browser to Continue reading

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How Cloudflare uses Terraform to manage Cloudflare

Configuration management is far from a solved problem. As organizations scale beyond a handful of administrators, having a secure, auditable, and self-service way of updating system settings becomes invaluable. Managing a Cloudflare account is no different. With dozens of products and hundreds of API endpoints, keeping track of current configuration and making bulk updates across multiple zones can be a challenge. While the Cloudflare Dashboard is great for analytics and feature exploration, any changes that could potentially impact users really should get a code review before being applied!

This is where Cloudflare's Terraform provider can come in handy. Built as a layer on top of the cloudflare-go library, the provider allows users to interface with the Cloudflare API using stateful Terraform resource declarations. Not only do we actively support this provider for customers, we make extensive use of it internally! In this post, we hope to provide some best practices we've learned about managing complex Cloudflare configurations in Terraform.

Why Terraform

Unsurprisingly, we find Cloudflare's products to be pretty useful for securing and enhancing the performance of services we deploy internally. We use DNS, WAF, Zero Trust, Email Security, Workers, and all manner of Continue reading

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The most programmable Supercloud with Cloudflare Snippets

Your traffic, how you like it

Cloudflare is used by a highly diverse customer base. We offer simple-to-use products for everything from setting HTTP headers to rewriting the URI path and performing URL redirects. Sometimes customers need more than the out-of-the-box functionality, not just adding an HTTP header - but performing some advanced calculation to create the output. Today they would need to create a feature request and wait for it to be shipped, write a Cloudflare Worker, or keep this modification ‘on origin’ - on their own infrastructure.

To simplify this, we are delighted to announce Cloudflare Snippets. Snippets are a new way to perform traffic modifications that users either cannot do via our productised offerings, or want to do programmatically. The best part? The vast majority of customers will pay nothing extra for using Snippets.

Users now have a choice. Perform the action via a rule. Or, if more functionality is needed, write a Snippet.  Neither will mean waiting. Neither will incur additional cost (although a high fair usage cap will apply). Snippets unblocks users to do what they want, when they want. All on Cloudflare.

Snippets will support the import of code written in various languages, Continue reading

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Keep track of Workers’ code and configuration changes with Deployments

Today we’re happy to introduce Deployments for Workers. Deployments allow developers to keep track of changes to their Worker; not just the code, but the configuration and bindings as well. With deployments, developers now have access to a powerful audit log of changes to their production applications.

And tracking changes is just the beginning! Deployments provide a strong foundation to add: automated deployments, rollbacks, and integration with version control.

Today we’ll dive into the details of deployments, how you can use them, and what we’re thinking about next.

Deployments

Deployments are a powerful new way to track changes to your Workers. With them, you can track who’s making changes to your Workers, where those changes are coming from, and when those changes are being made.

Cloudflare reports on deployments made from wrangler, API, dashboard, or Terraform anytime you make changes to your Worker’s code, edit resource bindings and environment variables, or modify configuration like name or usage model.

We expose the source of your deployments, so you can track where changes are coming from. For example, if you have a CI job that’s responsible for changes, and you see a user made a change through the Cloudflare dashboard, it’s easy Continue reading