[HN Gopher] Cloudflare Pages goes full stack
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Cloudflare Pages goes full stack
Author : samwillis
Score : 225 points
Date : 2021-11-17 14:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.cloudflare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.cloudflare.com)
| haliskerbas wrote:
| Cloudflare pages is amazing and IMO the right direction. For a
| small project its so easy for me to create an html file and zap
| it right into a custom domain in a few minutes, with so much
| flexibility.
|
| I hope the free tier stays as good as it is now! Thanks folks :)
| eastdakota wrote:
| I hope it gets even better. :-)
| holonomically wrote:
| Curious to know if anyone is running real production workloads
| with Cloudflare pages + workers. I'm asking because every time
| I've tried serverless offerings I've always been disappointed
| with the performance and debugging experience.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| > I've always been disappointed with the performance and
| debugging experience
|
| I think a comment like this deserves some details!
| holonomically wrote:
| Very often I'll have some function that works fine locally
| but breaks when deployed to the serverless environment and
| figuring out why it's broken takes a lot more time than
| expected. Often it's because I was using some feature that
| for some reason or another is not supported in the serverless
| sandbox but other times it's memory or CPU limitations that
| are completely opaque and impossible to debug. For example,
| is it possible to use libraries written in C. Node.js has a
| bunch of libraries like that and it's never clear if those
| are supported in any given serverless environment.
|
| Most of these platforms also don't have actual hard limits so
| it's possible to use up whatever budget is allotted to a
| project and then get throttled randomly without any
| indication of what exactly happened or why exactly the limits
| where reached. Maybe things have improved since last time I
| tried these platforms but I'm doubtful. It's very hard to
| design easily debuggable systems when there are so many
| layers of abstraction involved and there is no way to
| actually set breakpoints and see what is going on in the live
| process.
| kall wrote:
| Well for workers these questions can be answered more
| straightforward than for lambda:
|
| Will a node/C thing work?
|
| No. Only third party packages that are cleanly isomorphic
| will work. The most exciting thing you get is fetch. You
| can compile things to WebAssembly I guess.
|
| is performance good?
|
| For HTTP response times it's top notch. For compute, if it
| matters then it's not a good use case imho.
|
| If you've had performance issues with workers (not compute
| bound) I would like to hear about them, because I have put
| it into a "way to go when I want every answer to be
| reliably fast" bucket.
|
| Debugging?
|
| Well... it's a matter taste if what they provide is enough.
| Better than lambda but worse then a local server.
| remorses wrote:
| Cloudflare is going crazy wow
| lucasyvas wrote:
| Well on its way to being a huge contender in this space now. As I
| was saying on another post, I'm really just eager to see them
| roll out an in-house, more conventional datastore option that
| plugs in with this.
|
| If I can create a full-stack preview environment comprised of all
| these services, that will be huge. It's edge (no pun intended) is
| that it's globally available by default.
| samwillis wrote:
| We are only half way through their "Full Stack Week", so I'm
| hoping they have something coming on that...
|
| Monday was Workers talking to external services + durable
| objects.
|
| Tuesday was upgrades to workers and the toolkit to make it
| easer to develop full apps on them.
|
| Wednesday (today) was Worker+Pages integration and front end
| development.
|
| No announcements yet of any upgrades to the Worker Key Value
| store, wouldn't be surprised if they have a day of datastore
| type announcements - its the part of the "full stack" they
| haven't covered this week yet.
|
| They have to climax on Friday with something big right?
| ignoramous wrote:
| Price reductions and increase in script sizes (at 1MB,
| currently) would be nice, too.
| donmcronald wrote:
| Wow. I didn't know it was a full week of announcements. I was
| thrilled with the static typing thing yesterday and this
| today, so I'm pretty excited to see the next 2 days now.
| daqhris wrote:
| Plus, at the end of the week, announcements related to Web3
| services during a broadcast on Cloudfare TV. Their CEO will
| be talking to a prominent crypto investor.
| EGreg wrote:
| Honestly, I don't see the point in "serverless" as they call it
| (which is actually servers / centralized clouds), except maybe to
| have a common compilation target for stuff, to limit the surface
| area of APIs.
|
| Literally you can just control a lot more about your stack and do
| what you want (mysql, outside APIs, etc.) and use your servers as
| origin servers for the CDN. You can take your regular PHP site,
| separate out the "session-dependent" stuff into a separate
| service, and the rest is static resources that can be cached.
|
| Or even better: do ACTUAL serverless:
|
| https://qbix.com/blog/2018/04/03/onward-to-qbix-platform-2-0...
|
| https://qbix.com/blog/2020/01/02/the-case-for-building-clien...
|
| I gave a talk recently about it, that you might be interested in:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKPKuH6YCTc
| kart23 wrote:
| price & convenience. It's really that simple.
| ryan29 wrote:
| The Cloudflare stuff is the first "serverless" platform I've
| considered using. I develop independently and the value
| proposition is too good to ignore. They scale to $0 on idle
| deployments, I don't have to maintain any infrastructure, I
| don't need CI systems for building and deployment, I get
| preview URLs, I can layer in Cloudflare Access, etc..
|
| I'm going to drink the Kool-aid and see how it tastes :-)
| 0xy wrote:
| This is really exciting stuff, they're so close to a one stop
| shop for DevOps, monitoring, serverless backend, file storage,
| data store and frontend asset serving.
|
| I feel it's now within reach to migrate one of my side projects,
| except Redis and Postgres which I'll have to keep on AWS for now.
|
| It seems they're building a fully integrated developer experience
| that abstracts so much complexity away from deployment, security
| and otherwise.
|
| I have to imagine database and other solutions like pub/sub will
| be coming at some point in the future, too.
|
| (disclosure: long $NET)
| rtcoms wrote:
| postgres can be hosted via supabase. Redis also has cloud
| service I think
| jfvinueza wrote:
| upstash, very cf-worker oriented https://www.upstash.com/
| nevikashah wrote:
| Hey there - I'm the PM for Pages! Super excited about this
| release today. We also announced our support for GitLab and
| partnerships with several CMSes! Happy to answer any questions.
| tn890 wrote:
| If I just wanted to deploy a blog from github to Cloudflare
| pages, what would be the best way of doing that without writing
| javascript? Is there a way currently?
| masa331 wrote:
| For that you can use Github pages and you don't need to touch
| JS or Cloudflare
| tn890 wrote:
| Tried that, what I really like about Cloudflare is that it
| offers me more freedom than Github which basically forces
| you to use Jekyll if I'm not mistaken.
| masa331 wrote:
| What do you mean by more freedom? You definitelly don't
| need Jekyll for Github pages. Any static page can be
| hosted on Github pages
| leodriesch wrote:
| You are mistaken, you can deploy any static site.
|
| I've deployed a couple of static documentation sites with
| automated builds with the help of GitHub Actions [0].
|
| [0]: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/github-pages-
| action
| gregbrimble wrote:
| Absolutely possible! If you've just got a folder of static
| assets, you can connect it up to Pages, and enter that
| directory as the "build output directory".
|
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/framework-
| guides/dep...
| tn890 wrote:
| Thank you. Docs are good, I'm already up and running :)
| pacino wrote:
| Hi! Do you know if this release changes the ability to enable
| wildcard subdomain routing to Pages without requiring a
| >$200/mo Enterprise plan? Its a feature Netlify offer in their
| $19 "Pro" plan and is a roadblock for us to fully leverage
| Pages.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Just last week I moved two of my personal projects from GitLab
| to GitHub just so I could use Pages for them.
|
| If only I'd waited one more week...
| xbenjii wrote:
| Awesome! Do you know if/when there will be support for self-
| hosted Gitlab instances?
| no_wizard wrote:
| is this team hiring at all?
| rita3ko wrote:
| it sure is: https://boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/3156
| 953?gh_jid=...
| technobabbler wrote:
| It's really exciting to see Cloudflare Pages keep progressing!
|
| Any plan to eventually offer drop-in support for Next.js? (Not
| just static builds, but the backend server/serverless functions
| too, like Vercel... maybe mapping certain APIs to Workers?). It
| would be lovely to be able to leverage the power of that
| framework on Cloudflare infrastructure.
|
| Edit: Next and frameworks like it solve the "I love the idea of
| serverless, but don't want to reinvent the whole backend from
| scratch" problem. It's nice to have a framework abstract away
| problems like routing, caching, invalidations, buildchains,
| image transformations, etc. Cloudflare Pages and Workers can do
| almost all the same things, but requires more coding and
| configuration... that's the only reason we went with Next +
| Vercel instead of Pages.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Agree. Also, FWIW, what Cloudflare built is definitely a nice
| option. I would prefer even closer integration though and
| will be test driving this.
|
| But... This is almost just like an index.html and api.php
| file on a server. I think what devs really need/want is the
| Svelte Kit adaptor but an official Cloudflare way.
|
| Edit: Apparently the functions support parameterized files
| like .functions/friends/[name].js [1] which creates a lot
| closer integration. Put that feature front and center! I
| think this really solves many issues.
|
| [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-full-stack-with-
| pages/
| whiskypeters wrote:
| there is https://github.com/flareact/flareact in development
| by a shopify engineer, worth checking out... seems like a
| good architecture for deeper integration with workers runtime
| technobabbler wrote:
| Saw this a few months ago and briefly considered it, but it
| seemed too risky to use on a production website.
|
| Next.js is maintained by an entire company (Vercel). If
| Flareact ever gains official Cloudflare support, that'd be
| wonderful!
| DoctorOW wrote:
| This is the first thing I thought of as I was reading the
| server side section
| ignoramous wrote:
| Hi:
|
| - Are Pages _functions_ running Workers Unbound or Workers
| Bundled?
|
| - Do functions support Worker composition announced yesterday
| [0]?
|
| [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-worker-services/
| naiv wrote:
| The link to the 'example to see the SvelteKit adapter' in the
| article is broken (https://github.com/lukeed/pages-fullstack)
| showerst wrote:
| So is the link to the usage limits.
| nevikashah wrote:
| working on this now - should be fixed soon
| nevikashah wrote:
| clear cache and cookies - docs are up :)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Very exciting!
|
| What is your story with Pages and Rust Workers? Will they get
| the benefits of automatic deployment or is it still required to
| use Wrangler and manually wire things together?
| boleary-gl wrote:
| GitLab team-member here. So exciting to see GitLab support!
| I'll finally be giving Pages a try later today. :)
| zapita wrote:
| Is there a way to push content directly to Pages instead of
| having it pull from Github or Gitlab? Many teams have their own
| deployment tooling with pre-existing git integrations, and
| would rather add a Pages target to that. For example Netlify
| lets you bypass their github pull feature. Does Cloudflare?
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Yep this one is important to me too.
|
| I really dislike the GitHub integration approach, but I get
| that it makes it simpler for some use cases.
| segphault wrote:
| I'm interested in non-git deployment as well. For an image-
| heavy site, I would really prefer to avoid having to store
| static assets in GitHub so that I don't have to deal with git
| LFS. It would be nice if their CLI tool could support
| directly deploying a Pages application.
| brycewray wrote:
| Great announcements today. Hoping you can share any expected
| progress on the long build times (chiefly initializing the
| build environment itself), which right now constitute the only
| real down-side of CFP IMHO.
| nevikashah wrote:
| Totally understand the frustration! Improving build times is
| at the front of our minds and the work is well underway -
| stay tuned for updates!
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Does Pages now support multiple deployments from a single git
| repository? When I looked a while back it seemed like there was
| no way to host multiple domains on CF Pages from a monorepo. GH
| Pages has the same limitation, but Netlify does support
| monorepos.
| nevikashah wrote:
| support for monorepos are on deck and coming soon!
| Scarbutt wrote:
| It's not full stack until there is a real database offer ;)
| jonsully wrote:
| KV workers are pretty close FWIW
| getcrunk wrote:
| so whats the deal with the unlimited bandwidth? anyone pushing
| more than 10-100TB with input?
| redm wrote:
| It's interesting how the news cycle goes. Today on the HN
| homepage:
|
| Netlify Raises $105M (netlify.com)
|
| Netlify Acquires OneGraph (netlify.com)
|
| Cloudflare Pages Goes Full Stack (cloudflare.com)
|
| It will be interesting to see how this all plays out..
| destitude wrote:
| That is an interesting observation. I'd think Cloudflare has
| the upperhand because of their CDN and soon built-in object
| storage with "no" egress fees... going to be hard to compete
| against that.
| spyke112 wrote:
| I for one will be migrating my static sites away from Netlify.
| I were just waiting for the Gitlab support.
| chana_masala wrote:
| For what reasons?
| jadbox wrote:
| Also Rich Harris (Svelte creator) joined Vercel this week:
| https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/1458822051263823875
| seeekr wrote:
| Pretty cool to see them support Svelte(Kit) as the (or one of?)
| the first frameworks with direct support! Recently deployed a new
| application on Vercel, but very much looking forward to when
| Cloudflare will be an equally, or even more appealing choice!
| Amazing work, fantastic direction, keep it up!
| onebot wrote:
| My thought exactly!
| yumraj wrote:
| Maybe Cloudflare should have hired Rich Harris, instead of
| Vercel.
|
| Hint hint, nudge nudge to both Cloudflare and Rich Harris :)
| Thorentis wrote:
| I predict that Cloudflare will try to acquire Netlify in the near
| future. This product is getting pretty close if not entirely in
| direct competition with them.
| neom wrote:
| Cannot see that happening. Netlify is too big and has raised a
| lot of money, its already hard enough to deal with
| organizational debt once you become a public company. They
| acquired Linc, it was a pretty small startup and Glen Maddern
| their CTO is the engineer in this blog post. He also happens to
| be one of the smarter folks I've met. I really like the folks
| at Netlify and Vercel very much, all good people, but it I
| think it makes more sense that CF just takes the valuation of
| those two startups and tries to add it to their market cap
| organically.
| colinclerk wrote:
| How does everyone feel about Wrangler CLI versus git-triggered
| deploys through GitHub?
|
| I think Vercel and Render are both doing an incredible job with
| their deploy processes, and a lot is owed to them not requiring
| use of a CLI. I wonder if I'm in the minority here?
| lucasyvas wrote:
| Personally, I prefer a separate deploy command if you want it -
| it allows you to more easily use external CI systems. There are
| several app platforms I've written off because they only worked
| via git.
| squaresmile wrote:
| We are using GitHub Actions with wrangler and it works fine.
| Git push and the site is deployed to worker kv site.
|
| It didn't do the one commit one subdomain though but maybe they
| are adding it with this announcement.
| camgunz wrote:
| Supporting SvelteKit out of the box is _huge_ for Svelte. I
| wonder if it 's on the edge of an adoption surge.
| bovermyer wrote:
| This is anecdotal, but migrating my biggest personal project
| from Vue+Webpack to Svelte+Rollup was one of the easiest and
| best changes I've made so far.
|
| Recently adding esbuild to the mix made things much faster,
| too.
| getcrunk wrote:
| yea id love to hear more too
| koyote wrote:
| As someone who uses and enjoys Vue for my personal project,
| could you elaborate on why going to Svelte was a 'best'
| change?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Awesome. I want to use Cloudflare more, especially the email
| service they announced. How much longer do I have to wait for
| these things to become GA?
| rita3ko wrote:
| Pages itself has been GA for a little while now
| (https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-pages-ga/). For the
| integrations with Workers, it's TBD (we generally want to leave
| things in beta for a bit and let it bake in before giving you
| the thumbs up to put your production site on it), but we move
| fast, so likely sometime in the first half of next year.
| nkotov wrote:
| Interesting time (with the Netlify news as well). But for me,
| this is really exciting. Curious to see what reInvent brings soon
| as well.
| buraktokak wrote:
| If they handle nextjs integration, would be very interesting.
| brundolf wrote:
| Hmm, maybe it's finally time for me to move off of Heroku
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Does this require putting your website behind Cloudflare
| captchas, cause if so I don't foresee being able to use this.
| There is no reason to captcha a static website IMO.
| 888666 wrote:
| It does not.
| kokanee wrote:
| My first experience with Pages for a static site was really
| positive. I'm going to have to think of a full stack app idea
| just so I can try this out.
| cloverich wrote:
| It is amazing to me that Heroku is sitting there letting everyone
| pass them by. Heroku is still a great platform for a scalable 0
| effort full stack application. Yet as soon as you need a CDN
| hosted static site, you look outside the platform. Which is nuts,
| because they are such natural progressions (both ways) of each
| other.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| These are wonderful companies -- one trick ponies. They come up
| with one great product and it almost sells itself. That is,
| until they cannot come up with new supporting products to
| increase growth. At this point, the companies install an
| outside CEO, or they get acquired by a large company while
| everyone smart cashes out and leaves. The smaller and more
| agile companies like Cloudflare completely take their market
| share with a product that will eventually be better. They are
| like little does that get eaten by the wolves.
|
| Another example is pagerduty. A company that has been around
| for well over a decade with no product innovation. They
| installed an outside CEO, a sales/marketing person who really
| doesn't have the technical know-how to come up with new
| innovations. As of today, Datadog has entered their market with
| a direct competitor product. The CEO of Datadog, conversely,
| lived and breathed dev-ops in his entire work career. He is the
| wolf that will be eating the lunch of the non-technical does.
| lewisjoe wrote:
| As an indie software maker it frustrates me when I have to pay
| 50$ dollars to have a decent cloud server setup to run my apps.
| Yes there are 5$ shared vm-s, but I want a decent enough ram and
| cores to lift my load. And a 4gb ram and 4 cores shouldn't cost
| me 50$ either.
|
| I knew when WASM was introduced, this will bring out a new
| dimension of computing power available at affordable cost. But I
| wasn't sure how. But now I know. Cloudflare is doing some
| incredible work here, launching cloudflare workers and then
| capitalizing it to bring low cost computing to other edges. If
| lucky, we might enter an era where cloud infrastructure doesn't
| gets polarized into hands of tech giants like amazon, microsoft
| and stays affordable as it once was.
| Tomte wrote:
| Oracle Cloud free tier. 4 cores ARM64, 24GB of RAM, 200GB disk.
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| Fwiw, consensus, in some circles, is that's a very limited
| offering and they like to entirely delete accounts after the
| trial if you don't respond to their sales/onboarding emails.
|
| They may even continue to email you reminders about your
| trial expiring and tell you that you can still use all the
| free tier offerings, even though you can't log in anymore
| because the account is gone.
| welterde wrote:
| There are many many providers that offer deals that are more
| than within the stated budget.
|
| Hetzner Cloud will give you around 16-32GB and more than 4
| cores for <50$. For similar amount of money you can also get a
| dedicated server from them (and many other providers) with >
| 60GB of RAM, > 4 cores and nvme. Scaleway, OVH and others also
| have offerings that are not too far off (but less familiar with
| their offerings).
| Scarbutt wrote:
| When trying these cloud providers I always come back to AWS,
| the AWS network is so good.
| Hamuko wrote:
| It better be good since it's so expensive. NAT Gateways run
| on money.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| What does any of this have to do with WASM? WASM is still a
| second-class citizen on Cloudflare Workers and Javascript is
| still the only really practical choice.
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(page generated 2021-11-17 23:01 UTC)