Cloudflare launches Workers Unbound, next evolution of its serverless platform

Note: If I come across as a hater, in my opinion, I am not. I&#x27;m a fan, a fan who is frustrated!<p>We moved to Cloudflare from a larger CDN and used workers to duplicate the functionality otherwise not provided by Cloudflare. The initial results were great. As our workers became more complicated, especially when interacting with CloudFlares internal stack, the cracks started to show. Specifically, when you run into a problem, the documentation being too light to resolve corner case issues yourself, and support draws a big <i>zero</i> when it comes to Workers. Even as an Enterprise customer, it can take months to get a clear answer&#x2F;resolution, and that&#x27;s if you nag them.<p>As a platform, workers have great promise, and Cloudflare is making strides. As with most things CloudFlare, they could spend more time improving documentation, and exposing details on their internal stacks so you can self-service and resolve your issues. What I find is that Cloudflare is on to the next thing before fully completing, polishing, documenting, the previous three things they started.<p>For Workers, I&#x27;d like to see a trace tool built for Workers where you can debug what happened in a Live environment. Currently, they recommend outputting debug as JSON in a header.<p>The linked article is worthless. See the blog post, as this poster mentioned:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23965764" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23965764</a>

Nice to see more and more pushed to the edge, and good that it&#x27;s only the beginning of the week.<p>I&#x27;m a little surprised they stuck with the isolates model when moving to include generalized compute. We found isolates to be ideal for a cache layer, but it doesn&#x27;t have first class support for many languages: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.cloudflare.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;native-golang-support-for-workers&#x2F;65896" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.cloudflare.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;native-golang-support-for...</a><p>Very interested to see if they expand on their storage options throughout the week. Additional consistency guarantees in their KV offering would make it more competitive with Dynamo. I&#x27;d love to see a managed relational offering like Cockroach, or perhaps the addition of CockroachCloud to their bandwidth alliance.<p>One point I&#x27;m disappointed about is that they list API Gateway and DNS Queries (per MM requests) at $0.<p>This may be true if you&#x27;re deploying on a single domain with Cloudflare, but if you&#x27;re a SaaS and need SSL for custom domains, Cloudflare bumps you into their enterprise offering that costs a minimum of thousands per month, and (we found) netted out to about $5-10 per month per hostname: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudflare.com&#x2F;ssl-for-saas-providers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudflare.com&#x2F;ssl-for-saas-providers&#x2F;</a><p>(I recognize this is a different way of metering, but listing both at $0 feels like they&#x27;re arguing DNS &amp; TLS termination cost nothing at Cloudflare, and that was far from our experience)

Surprised nobody is commenting on the zero millisecond cold-start time:<p>&gt; The way the team engineered this is by queuing up the process while the two servers are still negotiating their TLS handshake.<p>That&#x27;s pretty cool. I&#x27;m trying to see a downside, given that presumably it won&#x27;t spin up a function for traffic from IPs it knows are abusive.

The private beta sign up form is here for ones interested in Workers Unbound: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudflare.com&#x2F;workers-unbound-beta&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudflare.com&#x2F;workers-unbound-beta&#x2F;</a> (disable adblockers to see the form). One key thing that sticks out is Cloudflare would charge for outgoing bandwidth at $0.09 per GB, a stark departure from unlimited bandwidth stance they&#x27;re known for, especially wrt Workers Bundled [0].<p>A few questions, if anyone from Cloudflare is here:<p>0. Can we expect in Workers Unbound support for Websockets, WebRTC, HTTP Connect, and Server Sent Events?<p>1. Would there be support for protocols other than HTTP? Say, a raw TCP &#x2F; UDP connection that is handed off by Spectrum to a Worker [1] (Spectrum here is redundant?)?<p>2. Inability to rate limit Workers in a cost effective way gives me sleepless nights [2]. The current rate limiting plans are too expensive when compared to Workers, almost 10x if expected <i>good requests</i> are to the tune of 10 million [3] (in my case good requests have potential to be much much higher). Any announcements due in this space?<p>3. Will the same isolate (Unbounded Worker), if kept running for long, be able to handle multiple connections&#x2F;requests concurrently, or would each HTTP connection create a new isolate (that is, a new Unbounded Worker instance)?<p>Thanks.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20791660" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20791660</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21921821" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21921821</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.cloudflare.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;how-to-protect-cloudflare-worker-from-ddos&#x2F;179017" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.cloudflare.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;how-to-protect-cloudflare...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.cloudflare.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;115000272247" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.cloudflare.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;11500027224...</a>

I&#x27;ve run into 3 big limitations when using Workers:<p>1) The CPU limit.<p>2) Not being able to use Node modules.<p>3) Not being able to add domains other than adding those to our CF account. SSL for SaaS solves this but, so far, it&#x27;s only available to enterprise customers.<p>The CPU limit was not so bad when considering Workers were not intended as a general use-case for serverless functions. Now that this has been lifted I feel the Workers environment limitations are going to be much more important.<p>You can&#x27;t, for example, use many Node packages in Workers since these are running in a custom V8 environment which resembles browser service workers. I say &quot;resembles&quot; because the API is not 100% identical. For example, you can use streams, but you don&#x27;t get the full API.

One alternative that&#x27;s available right now is Fly.io — Fly actually runs Docker containers at the edge, so you get a lot of the benefits including autoscaling up and down, your application following the sun across the world, etc.<p>I&#x27;m using them for a couple of small production projects and wrote up a gRPC example, quite happy with the service so far.

(Crosspost from the original thread that didn&#x27;t pick up traction: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23963877" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23963877</a> )<p>Nice to see more and more pushed to the edge, and good that it&#x27;s only the beginning of the week.<p>I&#x27;m a little surprised they stuck with the isolates model when moving to include generalized compute. We found isolates to be ideal for a cache layer, but it doesn&#x27;t have first class support for many languages: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.cloudflare.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;native-golang-support-for.." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.cloudflare.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;native-golang-support-for...</a>.<p>Very interested to see if they expand on their storage options throughout the week. Additional consistency guarantees in their KV offering would make it more competitive with Dynamo. I&#x27;d love to see a managed relational offering like Cockroach, or perhaps the addition of CockroachCloud to their bandwidth alliance.<p>One point I&#x27;m disappointed about is that they list API Gateway and DNS Queries (per MM requests) at $0.<p>This may be true if you&#x27;re deploying on a single domain with Cloudflare, but if you&#x27;re a SaaS and need SSL for custom domains, Cloudflare bumps you into their enterprise offering that costs a minimum of thousands per month, and (we found) netted out to about $5-10 per month per hostname: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudflare.com&#x2F;ssl-for-saas-providers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudflare.com&#x2F;ssl-for-saas-providers&#x2F;</a><p>(I recognize this is a different way of metering, but listing both at $0 feels like they&#x27;re arguing DNS &amp; TLS termination cost nothing at Cloudflare, and that was far from our experience)

&gt;Data Transfer (per egress GB) $0.09<p>Surprising that Workers Unbound charges egress (first time egress is directly charged by Cloudflare?) and at this quite expensive AWS-like price.

Some more on how we think about edge computing and the serverless market: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;cloudflare-workers-serverless-week&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;cloudflare-workers-serverless-we...</a>

I see CPU mentioned a bit, but nothing about memory. It seems like 128 MB isn&#x27;t enough to run Nuxt.js (Vue server-side rendering), but it would be awesome to be able to run that (or Next.js for React) at the edge. I haven&#x27;t actually tried yet on Workers, but they seem to recommend 512 MB memory for App Engine for example.<p>Are Cloudflare&#x27;s machine sizes unsuitable for being able to offer more memory as an option?

The data transfer pricing is a big letdown considering Cloudflare has always has free transfer.<p>When transfer is so expensive, it makes it harder to switch from other clouds that have more than just compute capacity, especially since you might be paying double to transfer between cloud-&gt;CF-&gt;user

I see Go listed as a supported language. Is that through WASM build targets or something else?

Cloudflare should focus on getting their existing services working. I tried their 1.1.1.1 Warp VPN on Android as a paying subscriber and it just broke my internet connection most of the time.

Looks very interesting!<p>Does anybody know whether this will remove the current maximum runtime limitation? As far as I can tell, workers have a maximum duration of 10ms on the free plan and 50ms on the paid one.<p>I would assume that it does, considering that it&#x27;s being compared to AWS Lambda, which has a timeout of 15 minutes.

LuaJIT support, please. Other than that some tighter consistency guarantees around KV would be nice. I’m PoCing a small game server on workers and the KV is working great for this so far (turn by turn, but still).

Does this also remove the 30 scripts per account limit? I looked into using Cloudflare workers to power a cloud runtime for WASM (think thousands of dynamically generated WASM binaries serving traffic for different sub-domains), but the script limit and CPU limits were a major blocker. I&#x27;ve had great experiences with Cloudflare and would love to use workers if it opens up these limits.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.cloudflare.com&#x2F;workers&#x2F;about&#x2F;limits" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.cloudflare.com&#x2F;workers&#x2F;about&#x2F;limits</a>

At one point, Cloudflare suggested they might open source some of their v8 work; does anyone know if that still might happen? (Even just the bindings for WebCrypto would be interesting.)

I learned about Cloudflare Workers early this year and they definitely seem simpler than AWS Lambda + Gateway combo to deploy and rollout.<p>Unless one is invested in AWS for other needs or need one of the language which Workers doesn’t support (Java?, Go?), it might be a fair option to consider.

Part of their defense against cpu side channel attacks was the narrow execution limits; did they decide those are unnecessary? (That was also how they prevented v8 from allocating tons of memory.)

They should work on reliability before new niche features. I work with another developer on his clients sites and he’s a Cloudflare fan. Almost every complaint and failure we’ve had reported has come from Cloudflare errors. Not issues with our stuff, issues with Cloudflare. I use cloudfront with a different set of clients with semi-high visability sites and have never had an issue stemming from it.

&gt; Isolates are far more lightweight than containers, a central tenet of most other serverless providers’ architecture. Containers effectively run a virtual machine, and there’s a lot of overhead associated with them.<p>Kill me, now. Containers are in no respect virtual machines. Cloudflare Workers, by contrast, literally are virtual machines: your code runs on V8.

Isn&#x27;t this statement incorrect? &quot;Isolates are far more lightweight than containers ... Containers effectively run a virtual machine, and there’s a lot of overhead associated with them&quot;<p>Everything I have read suggests containers (being based on CGroups) add virtually no overhead at all (in the vicinity of 1% at worse from memory).

It looks Cloudflare Workers and AWS Lambda are just re-implementations of Google App Engine. It is a sad that Google half gave up App Engine, by switching to a bad pricing scheme and not putting enough energy in developing GAE and further innovating in this area.

Has the status changed on time synchronization on endpoints? Using workers to deliver time over http would work really well if the servers they&#x27;re hosted on are guaranteed to be through standard NTP.

If they make an aws efs like method of storage, someone might build something very interesting on it.

Do workers support Go natively yet?

The linked Techcrunch article is pretty light on actual content. The actual Cloudflare blogpost describes what this product is: &quot;We are extending our CPU limits to allow customers to bring all of their workloads onto Workers, no matter how intensive.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;introducing-workers-unbound&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;introducing-workers-unbound&#x2F;</a>

I know that Cloudflare people comment here. So can I go on a tangent and ask what’s holding up registering new domains through Cloudflare (posting on the Cloudflare blogs or community forums doesn’t get a response)?<p>Cloudflare registrar was announced (and released) nearly two years ago, allowing people to transfer their domains to Cloudflare. It was declared then that registering new domains would be coming soon. But here we are nearly two years later and there’s no sign that this is coming this year either. Meanwhile, the company even went public through an IPO. What’s the holdup and why the radio silence? I’d actually prefer a blog post about this on the official site than a “what should we tell and what shouldn’t we tell” response here.