San Francisco, CA, March 13, 2018 — www.cloudflare.com, the leading Internet performance and security company, today announced the general availability of Cloudflare Workers, a new way for developers to deploy and execute their code directly at the edge of Cloudflare’s global network.
Prior to Cloudflare Workers, there were two main places where developers could deploy code: front-end code running on an end user’s device, or back-end code running in a central data center. Both have their drawbacks. Code running on an end user’s device is difficult to update and is limited by power and bandwidth. Code running in a central data center can have substantial network latency and be subject to outages.
Cloudflare Workers gives developers a third place to deploy their code close to their customers — at the edge of Cloudflare’s ever-expanding global network — bringing the power and flexibility of a cloud data center, and the redundancy of a massively distributed system, within milliseconds of virtually every Internet user.
“Prior to today, the only way to write code that ran at the edge of Cloudflare’s network was to be a Cloudflare employee. Cloudflare Workers opens the scale of our global network to any developer,” explained Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “By bridging the front-end and back-end with a third place to develop code, we’re excited Cloudflare Workers will empower a new class of applications that were previously impossible. I can’t wait to see what developers build.”
The benefits of Cloudflare Workers include:
Cloudflare announced the Cloudflare Workers beta in September. Since then, customers in the beta have run billions of edge computing tasks using Cloudflare Workers.
“Cloudflare Workers saves us a great deal of time,” said John Thompson, Senior System Administrator at MaxMind. “Managing bot traffic without Workers would consume valuable development and server resources that are better spent elsewhere.”
“At Postmates, customer trust is the most important thing,” said Aabhas Sharma, Infrastructure Lead at Postmates. “We needed a way to do a high volume of redirects without dedicating additional internal resources. Ultimately, Cloudflare Workers gave us a simpler way to build flexibility and fine-grained control into our systems at the edge for a more reliable and secure process.”
"Moving away from VCL and adopting Cloudflare Workers will allow us to do some creative routing that will let us deliver JavaScript to npm's millions of users even faster than we do now," said CJ Silverio, CTO of npm, Inc. "We will be building our next generation of services on Cloudflare's platform and we get to do it in JavaScript!"
The use cases for Cloudflare Workers are emerging across a variety of verticals:
To learn more about Cloudflare Workers, please check out the resources below.