Cloudflare Launches Workers Unbound, the Next Evolution of Its Serverless Platform (techcrunch.com) 32
Cloudflare today announced the private beta launch of Workers Unbound, the latest step in its efforts to offer a serverless platform that can compete with the likes of AWS Lambda. TechCrunch reports: The company first launched its Workers edge computing platform in late 2017. Today it has "hundreds of thousands of developers" who use it, and in the last quarter alone, more than 20,000 developers built applications based on the service, according to the company. Cloudflare also uses Workers to power many of its own services, but the first iteration of the platform had quite a few limitations. The idea behind Workers Unbound is to do away with most of those and turn it into a platform that can compete with the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google. Cloudflare aims to expose to third-party developers all of the services it builds for its internal consumption. The original Workers service will continue to operate (but under the Workers Bundled moniker) and essentially become Cloudflare's serverless platform for basic workloads that only run for a very short time. Workers Unbound -- as the name implies -- is meant for more complex and longer-running processes.
When it first launched Workers, the company said that its killer feature was speed. Today, [CEO Matthew Prince] argues that speed obviously remains an important feature -- and Cloudflare Workers Unbound promises that it essentially does away with cold-start latencies. But developers also adopted the platform because of its ability to scale and its price. Indeed, Workers Unbound, Cloudflare argues, is now significantly more affordable than similar offerings. "For the same workload, Cloudflare Workers Unbound can be 75% percent less expensive than AWS Lambda, 24 percent less expensive than Microsoft Azure Functions, and 52 percent less expensive than Google Cloud Functions," the company says in today's press release.
Another feature Prince highlighted is regulatory compliance. "I think the thing we're realizing as we talk to our largest enterprise customers is that for real companies -- not just the individual developer hacking away at home -- but for real businesses in financial services or anyone who has to deal with a regulated industry, the only thing that trumps ease of use is regulatory compliance, which is not sexy or interesting or anything else but like if your GC says you can't use XYZ platform, then you don't use XYZ platform and that's the end of the story," Prince noted. Speed, though, is of course something developers will always care about. Prince stressed that the team was quite happy with the 5ms cold-start times of the original Workers platform. The way the team engineered this is by queuing up the process while the two servers are still negotiating their TLS handshake. Cloudflare also argues that developers can update their code and have it go live globally within 15 seconds. Another area the team worked on was making it easier to use the service in general. Among the key new features here is support for languages like Python and a new SDK that will allow developers to add support for their favorite languages, too.
When it first launched Workers, the company said that its killer feature was speed. Today, [CEO Matthew Prince] argues that speed obviously remains an important feature -- and Cloudflare Workers Unbound promises that it essentially does away with cold-start latencies. But developers also adopted the platform because of its ability to scale and its price. Indeed, Workers Unbound, Cloudflare argues, is now significantly more affordable than similar offerings. "For the same workload, Cloudflare Workers Unbound can be 75% percent less expensive than AWS Lambda, 24 percent less expensive than Microsoft Azure Functions, and 52 percent less expensive than Google Cloud Functions," the company says in today's press release.
Another feature Prince highlighted is regulatory compliance. "I think the thing we're realizing as we talk to our largest enterprise customers is that for real companies -- not just the individual developer hacking away at home -- but for real businesses in financial services or anyone who has to deal with a regulated industry, the only thing that trumps ease of use is regulatory compliance, which is not sexy or interesting or anything else but like if your GC says you can't use XYZ platform, then you don't use XYZ platform and that's the end of the story," Prince noted. Speed, though, is of course something developers will always care about. Prince stressed that the team was quite happy with the 5ms cold-start times of the original Workers platform. The way the team engineered this is by queuing up the process while the two servers are still negotiating their TLS handshake. Cloudflare also argues that developers can update their code and have it go live globally within 15 seconds. Another area the team worked on was making it easier to use the service in general. Among the key new features here is support for languages like Python and a new SDK that will allow developers to add support for their favorite languages, too.
I'm feeling old (Score:3)
I read TFS, TFA and even the link mentioned in TFS. But all I see is a word salad.
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I read TFS, TFA and even the link mentioned in TFS. But all I see is a word salad.
Likewise...okay, I didn't go to TFA, but still. This is /., why would you expect me to actually go to the article.
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That's mainly because "serverless" is bullshit on a client-server architecture like the Internet.
Serverless is like shared hosting (Score:2)
As far as I can tell, "serverless" means that a particular app isn't bound to a particular physical or virtual server. In the case of AWS EC2, an application runs on an "instance", essentially a virtual private server (VPS) that can be rapidly provisioned or decommissioned. The VPS provider bills the user for having the VPS turned on whether requests are coming in or not, and the user is responsible for turning instances on and off as demand varies throughout the day. A "serverless" program, by contrast, is
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I have no idea why anyone would use AWS Lambda, to me it seems like always the wrong choice architecturally, but apparently people disagree.
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I tried it. Sometimes you need a really simple function for a really simple application.
In my case I have a temperature sensor outside my house. This connects over MQTT to Amazon's IoT cloud. Every minute, it gets a reading and sends it over MQTT. The AWS Lambda has a trigger: when it gets a message on this MQTT topic, take the message, timestamp it (my sensor doesn't have a clock), and insert it to a database.
There's a second Lambda function that's scheduled to run every 15 minutes, take the last 15 minute
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. I don't know what happens, though, if you're DDOSed. I know they have facilities for logging and trigger events on over- and under-usage, that can notify you over email or SMS.
The worst I've heard is someone accidentally writing a recursive without a base case. The stack can grow deep.
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Yeah... could some young’un please explain to us old folks what the use case is for something like this?
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Yeah... could some young’un please explain to us old folks what the use case is for something like this?
Try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Thanks. I read it and understand what it IS, just not what functions make sense to use it FOR. You are limited in terms of security and privacy, it isn’t fast for a periodic function, but it is easier on a developer somehow to abstract the full stack.
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Ok, found a use case that makes sense to me for Lambda:
So
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They had 10 different sizes that needed to be generated, so presumably dumping an image in one bucket would generate the thumbnails automatically, and you would not need to worry about resources if you posted a bunch of images at once.
Weak use case, I agree... and still not without security implications as the resizer could be compromised to malform the image for an exploit.
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Ok, found a use case that makes sense to me for Lambda:
So if you have something trivial that would be a shell script traditionally, you can create that function “in the cloud” and work with other resources you already have in the cloud.
The thing is that Bash can launch multiple parallel imagemagick processes, so that's not exactly a big deal.
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The key here is, though, "Webscale". Suppose you're a website with hundreds of images uploaded per second. You would need to either figure out some sort of queuing solution, or just throw money at the problem and add more servers and a load balancer in front of it. (yes, I know in 2020 a single CPU can resize dozens of photos per second, but bear with me, this is just an example).
Lambdas run in as many servers as needed: AWS already has a load balancer and fires instances as needed to fill your demand. They
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See this little app I made to learn what Lambdas are about: https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
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the solution to secure serverless apps is close partnership between developers, DevOps, and AppSec, also known as DevSecOps
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Somebody let loose the buzzword generator genetic algorithm, otherwise known as BuzGen2Alg.
By the way, "the solution is a close partnership between..." is another way to say, "You guys figure it all out, I'm outta here."
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Translation: a way to nickle-and-dime the customer with time-creeping prices and surprise "service fees".
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This is true, but also, there are windows of usage where this sort of "utility computing" makes financial sense.
The cheapest VPS is around $5 a month. AWS Lambda costs:
$0.20 per million calls to your function, and $0.0000002083 per 100 milliseconds of use of a 128MB instance (that is, a function that handles up to 128MB of data in RAM). This, multiplied by 10 (to make it 1 sec) * 86400 * 30 = $ 5,39.
If your application runs 24/7 at 100% load, the VPS wins by 0,39 cents a month.
If your application runs at 50
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To weed out old folks who don't keep up with the latest bullshit that you want on your own resume to make sure it has all the latest buzzwords in order to score high on resume filter bots.
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I think what they are talking about is remote access to VMs for workers. Instead of supplying them with a PC with the software they need on it, or a VM running on a server somewhere with that software, they can spool them up in the cloud on demand.
It's not quite as simple as "somebody else's computer" because if you have your own server you can manage software licences with existing kit. If you have VMs that spool up on demand you need some new software to do that, and that's what Cloudflare is providing al
As a developer that has (Score:3)
"that developers can update their code and have it go live globally within 15 seconds"
This could be a fun tool
"regulatory compliance" (Score:2)
ie giving your users data to the US government. What we've [codeberg.org] been warning y'all about since the beginning.
serverless platform (Score:2)
Serverless platform? Is this some kind of market speak or renaming of things I missed? I read TFS and it sounds like Cloudflare is going to offer a SERVER platform similar to Azure or AWS but is somehow faster.
Okay. Cool. Really think the name of the service is lame but cool if it brings competition to the market space.
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Serverless computing simply means you, the customer do not have a server to care about or manage. There is obviously a server, but is saying widely distributed managed autoscaling container services any easier to understand.
Serverless is basically a container that you do not control (although with aws lambda layers, you do have some control) that loads and executes your stateless code. They then bill you for the milliseconds your container ran. Done correctly this allows you to scale massively without buyi
Re: serverless platform (Score:1)
They invented magic rainbows and unicorn farts. That's how you make a serverless cloud.
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Well if it is like AWS Lambda then look here.
https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ [amazon.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The site mentions using it to create hashtags.. I can't see using it myself but the below Wikipedia entry is neat as far as spinning up and down in milliseconds. Only.. lets say you have a ton of seismic sensors, or a ton of something else and you get hit by massive tremors or say a ddos? Will AWS charge you huge amounts of money because of spinning up huge numbers of parallel workers? I don't think I
Lighting A Fart (Score:3, Interesting)
The word Cloudflare always makes me think of lighting a fart with a match. I see most of what that company does with distaste. I don't like DOS attacks, but net-cops suck, too.
Further reading (Score:2)
I Wanna Go Fast: Why Searching Through 500M Pwned Passwords Is So Quick
https://www.troyhunt.com/i-wan... [troyhunt.com]
Serverless to the Max: Doing Big Things for Small Dollars with Cloudflare Workers and Azure Functions
https://www.troyhunt.com/serve... [troyhunt.com]
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As you know, using CloudFlare means there is going to be a service that sits between your webserver, and your visitor. Workers actually give you control again right at the last minute - which is how I am modifying headers a final time.
Without workers:
Your webserver -> CloudFlare -> Visitor
With workers
Your webserver -> CloudFlare -> Workers -> Visitor
Som