Cloudflare Launches Workers Unbound, the Next Evolution of Its Serverless Platform

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.

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