One thing that stuck out was the comment about "Twitter cards", since Vercel/Next now has this built in: https://twitter.com/vercel/status/1579561293069316096
Static hosting has historically been seen as exactly that, static and immutable.
Things like Cloudflare functions/workers can turn static hosting into dynamic content delivery while maintaining (most of) the benefits of static hosting.
Granted, this can be done whether the underlying content is hosted on Cloudflare, AWS, or a server in your garage so long as it’s proxied/CDN’d by a service like Cloudflare or Cloudfront+Lambda@edge, etc.
It's nothing that new though, Firebase (part of GCP) and Netlify have had that for years. CloudFlare just have the right combination of marketing, reputation, pricing and tech to make headlines with it again.
In the 90s I was using SSI to build dynamic, but static sites
-- header --
-- hierarchal javscript menuing --
-- content --
-- footer --
-- tail --
Benefits are obvious: high reliability and speed to serve the static files. In addition, if the cms server is down for whatever reason, your website is still live and working fully (not just cached pages, all of them) just fine.
Actually you can think of it like a pre-built cache that it’s deployed to cloudflare kv store.
Other cool features we have is real time collaboration in the editor.
Check more about our architecture decisions here: https://bluocms.com/cms-cloudflare/
Like are the workers just serving as your backend at that point? Or are they doing something more or different as well?
Can't think of anything next.js specific you miss out on, you can just configure anything in a vercel.json file.
Github pages and likely others also supports this format, so moving between those two services doesn't exhibit this problem. Moving to cgi-bin will.
I'd suggest Cloudflare shouldn't try to establish their scheme as canonical url and rather implement github pages behavior, but what do I know... I'm just hosting an old fashioned blog, not a JAMstack/SPA/whatever thing
Also, old-school is still the dominant way with how small sites are hosted, in terms of number of hosting providers who offer cgi hosting.
I preferred to strip away the .html extensions anyway, so it was okay in my case. CF should trigger a HTTP 308 for older .html to the new urls automatically.
Is there at least an nginx-cloudflare module that lets you self-host this stuff?
https://blog.cloudflare.com/workerd-open-source-workers-runt...
Oh, right, vendor lock-in.
We did not create our own engine to create "lock-in". On the contrary, it would be a huge win for us if we could simply run FastCGI or Node or whatever applications unmodified. We'd be able to onboard a lot more customers more quickly that way! Our product is our physical network (with hundreds of locations around the world), not our specific development environment.
But none of that tech scales well enough that we could run every app in every one of our locations at an affordable price. Meeting that goal required new tech. The best we could do is base it on open standard APIs (browser APIs, mostly), so a lot of code designed for browsers ports over nicely.
(I'm the lead engineer for Workers. These were my design choices, originally.)
Enjoy your week! :)
I'm interested in Durable Objects but I don't know how to work within the 50-subrequest limit on the Free or Bundled plans.
It sounds like I can only read from 50 Durable Objects or KV queries in a single request. If my usage pattern is e.g., sharing docs with many users, how would I let more than 50 users access a doc?
Whether I consider fanning out on writes or fanning in on reads I'd need more than 50 subrequests. How should I approach this?
You can run it locally[2], and efforts are underway to standardize much of it so that the same code can run on Workers, Node.js, and Deno[3]. The Workers runtime is also open source[4], although in practice this is likely to be less useful for most use cases than just using one of the other JavaScript runtimes if you're self-hosting.
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/how-worke... [2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/functions#d... [3] https://wintercg.org/ [4] https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
Plain old CGI doesn't scale beyond toy usage--it spawns a process per request.
So there really isn't a good single option for Cloudflare to use.
I'd be willing to bet the opposite: CGI is more than enough for 80% of workload, performance-wise.
There are a few good reasons why CGI isn't the best today: the tooling doesn't exist, the security model is really bad, and you can cram fewer websites on a single machine, so for the same number of websites you need more machines, and that's an ecological aberration. But there is no problem about CGI being too slow.
Cgi just isn't necessary anymore and would be more baggage than anything at this point.
The old web stacks are just time sinks. It's so much nicer to be able to git push... And that's it. Done.
Can you elaborate? My CGI-based website is deployed with `git push` as well, not sure what the difference is there.
Grab any 3 commonly used pieces of technology whose names can be used to form a fun initialism, append stack to the end, and soon there will be experts speaking at conferences dedicated to it. JamStack is an example you mentioned. I’ve heard others over the years.
I disagree that it’s a useful unit of thought. No one I know or work with ever talks about “web stacks” this way. Am I missing something here? Is this just some kind of niche? Who’s marketing these?
For example you have security. CGI with multitenants is hard if not impossible. At least for the tenants that will want to use this.
Then there is scaling, resource consumption, and predictability (for planning).
There's a reason Larry Ellison owns an entire Hawaiian island, and it ain't nothin' nice...it ain't nothin' nice (#QTip)
> As a shortcut, I used GPT-3 to generate a basic typescript function for me. This let me look at TS type definitions and get a better idea of what’s available so I could get developing.
As a long time programmer, I keep trying to maintain my skepticism of AI/ML techniques for program authoring. Comments like this are dissolving my objections by the minute...
Otherwise static websites are only for devs.
Also check - a WordPress plugin for static site generation and deployment https://github.com/WP2Static/wp2static
The same website without Cloudflare CDN and just using a simple caching plugin is much faster than the exported version by wp2static hosted on Cloudflare pages.
It has fallen from 99 to 78 in the mobile page speed test.
I tried creating a copy of the website using wget, it was faster but i faced issues with missing files and posts on the main page using temporary query links and not the permanent links.
So I went through the Hassle of compiling wp2static and just eating the performance loss instead.
If you can host it on workers for example, you can get an entirety free, managed website just with one click(obviously someone would do a template to enable you to setup wp on cf pages if that was possible).
I keep seeing these 'JAMstack' sites are the new hot thing when a static wordpress site is enough and easier to update than 'JAMstack' sites, in reality these sites are just glorified HTML under a CDN.
I don't see the benefit of JAMstack when you can just place a static WP site under a CDN like Cloudflare and have all the benefits of WP and a CMS to edit content.
At least with Cloudflare they are more than just a CDN, others like Netlify and Vercel seem to be both over engineered and overpriced for what they do.
Jamstacks really shine when you can decouple the frontend from the backend(s), because then you have an easily replicable single repo with nothing but code. You can deploy it to any Jamstack host with a push and they handle all of the scaling and https and caching concerns. And the backend teams, whether an in house endpoint or content writers working on a hosted headless CMS, never have to care about the stack.
A middle ground that's interesting to explore is using WordPress with Advanced Custom Forms as a backend plus a Jamstack frontend. ACF is still quite a bit more powerful than any of the headless CMS solutions I've tried, but it does mean you still have to maintain a LEMP stack, which is a headache in and of itself.
There are also managed services for doing this that take care of everything for you, from the WP hosting env, to the static hosting and CDN, along with replicating certain types of dynamic functionality on the static site like forms and search.
One example of this type of managed static WordPress hosting service is Strattic: https://www.strattic.com.
Besides WP, there are static CMSes that fit a modern workflow perfectly.
Interesting, simply-static never worked for me, only wp2static did and it had a lot of bugs.
> WP run on an arm64 instance that was only started when editing was needed.
How do you do this?, are you doing some kind of webserver container run trigger? Or running it on a managed platform?
> Besides WP, there are static CMSes that fit a modern workflow perfectly.
Yeah but they aren't so customizable and flexible like WordPress, the goal is to be able to create a whole static site without needing to write anything manually.
My sense is it's still a ways out from being practical, though.
Yes, there are a bunch of limitations - but in practice I quite appreciate the boundaries and the reasoning. There's also the portability question, but we're talking about PaaS. As someone who was using Firebase for many years, and static AWS + lambda prior to that I find this evolution entirely refreshing.
I've pushed 5 personal projects on pages since Jan and working on more. Most recently https://thesom.au/gh/cvms
> As a shortcut, I used GPT-3 to generate a basic typescript function for me. This let me look at TS type definitions and get a better idea of what’s available so I could get developing.
My assumption was that their prompt was something like "typescript cloudflare function" and they just used the resultant code to see types in action inside their IDE.
I just got access to OpenAI codex. I used edit function and asked it to modify the JS hello world, to add typescript annotations.
This is the git commit following that gpt conversation :)
-export async function onRequest(context) {
+export async function onRequest(context: {
+ request: Request;
+ env: { [key: string]: string };
+ params: { [key: string]: string };
+ waitUntil: (promise: Promise<any>) => void;
+ next: () => Promise<void>;
+ data: { [key: string]: any };
+}) {
As people smarter than me have said, if a video or in this case article asks a question, the answer is usually "no".
I'd love to see a more detailed post about that. I don't know any TS devs using that kind of workflow.
The biggest issue with Copilot is that, to use it well, you need to know:
- How to write functioning code.
- How to quickly review other people's code for correctness.
- How to write good comments.
- How to tweak the ordering in which you write code such that it's easier for Copilot to understand.
- How Copilot and other GANs work, in general. An awareness that Copilot is built on GPT-3, familiarity with what that implies, and so on.
And if you don't, that results in the AI seemingly not working as well, which makes it easy to make the assumption that it isn't an incredibly useful tool. It is, it just has a learning curve measured in weeks.
I believe this is why we constantly have arguments on whether or not it's helpful.
You can work around this with some Workers that capture the dynamic routes, request the nextjs html file and return that, but then you're using up your Functions quota as well.
I have found that with Cloudflare's documentation that where it's lacking they have the ability to PR in changes and if you go back to a saved page, I've found them pleasantly updated numerous times.
Thankfully the cutting edge development is based off of open standards that you can easily build off of. I know personally that I've found most of the sticking points of developing against Cloudflare to be easily mitigated and just be an overall better experience as a customer than with another hosting provider.
It doesn't hurt that they aren't charging me all that much personally, but I have a day job that fills up the Cloudflare stock price just fine.
Their docs are subpar because Cloudflare is just not interested enough in documentation improvements and is hostile to the people who are interested and who try to make the improvements.
I tried fixing a 404 in their docs once. This would have taken, you know, approximately 2 seconds with a real wiki or CMS[1]. What resulted instead was an excruciating back-and-forth that took 9 messages over a span of exactly 5 hours, ended in no fix, and a Cloudflare dev trying to "upperhand" me (in the vein of George Constanza's pre-emptive breakup—"I'm afraid that I am gonna have to break up with you"[2]).
Sure, Cloudflare team, there's nothing wrong, I guess, with choosing to believe in the delusion that a repo full of Markdown files and the GitHub generation's busted-ass PR-based edit workflow is an acceptable substitute, just like there's nothing wrong with writing your name with a pencil that has a brick taped to it[3].
1. <https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.mdc/c/BU09C48bmGU>
I was very excited when both of these technologies were first announced (years ago).
I tried them, immediately, then (during the initial beta). They were clunky, half-baked, and don't even get me started on the DX of developing against them. Literally missing from cloudflare's own CLI - the official docs described how to manually deploy via CURLing endpoints. It felt like manually FTPing files onto a server, like in the 90s.
Ok fine, this is an early beta, let's let this bake longer.
So a few months ago, I started a new greenfield project and once again decided to give Functions + Durable Objects a shot... and was astounded to find the exact same half-baked experience, where different "beta" versions of the CLI had to be installed in order to support the different endpoints, and these were in fact mutually-exclusive.
Cloudflare has some cool ideas, but they seem to like rolling out 70% of a cool idea and then moving into the next shiny thing without ever making the first thing actually polished and reliable. After wasting many hours with Cloudflare's DX, I decided to never waste more time with them as a development platform (vs an optimization layer / CDN / etc).
https://www.amazon.com/Reynolds-Wrap-Aluminum-Foil-Square/dp...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
Identity as service is another category that's egregiously priced, and it's usually priced based on monthly active users too, which is the worst. It would be great to see Cloudflare disrupting that one as well.
> Workers can also send emails for free, and soon you will be able to process them as well with Email Workers.
There's got to be some limitations to that and I don't like it when they're not well defined. Looking at the MailChannels pricing, it looks like it's roughly 40x more expensive than AWS SES on the low end and 4x on the biggest plan before negotiating a custom deal.
I can send 500k emails and have a dedicated IP on SES for the same cost as 40k emails from MailChannels. Since their big value add seems to be scanning emails to prevent spam from user generated content, I just don't see it if that's not functionality you need because it's all wasted resources / unnecessary cost in those cases.
I assume there's a point where it's no longer free and I'm guessing the cost once you get there will be high.
Plus, am I sharing IPs with people who are sending such low-quality mail it requires outbound spam filtering? That seems like a huge negative on the deliverability side of things.
They are very good at detecting abuse. The leading cause of email deliverability problems is not advertisement, it's servers being hijacked by malicious actors.
In practice, no one is running workerd at their VMs, so it seems weird for me to compare the two.
Cloudflare Pages is better than [insert your favorite hosting service] would make more sense. Still, very cool tech.
Support during this early preview includes the following functionality: - Deploy Web apps comprised of static web content - Deploy Web apps that use pre-rendering / Static Site Generation (SSG) - Deploy Web apps that use server-side Rendering (SSR)—full server rendering on demand
Cheers,
Anyways, the pages import to take an existing git repository with a slew of CMS systems (mine being Hugo) supported, and the ability to just publish it to a custom domain in a series of clicks was actually really simple.
I think I dedicated 30 minutes of entire work and just saved ~$20/month because of it.
When somebody hit my webserver for the first time, how long are they gonna wait for the page to be loaded?
Assuming a noop in the functions part.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/how-worke...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-workers-durable-obje...
> Durable Objects make this easy. Not only do they make it easy to assign a coordination point, but Cloudflare will automatically create the coordinator close to the users using it and migrate it as needed, minimizing latency.
Cloudflare services are awesome.
Their documentation tends to be OK but thin. Certainly not great.
Reference guides with every object/function/method documented.
Links to sample code on github.
With CloudFlare Pages you click a couple buttons in the UI and push to GitHub. When I tested it, I didn't get bogged down managing infrastructure which I've always struggled with (overthinking) in the past. I was almost instantly writing code that solves my problem(s).
The advantages aren't as huge with a purely static site, but they're still there IMO.
It's currently not very competitive with the likes of AWS API Gateway at $0.25/million minutes.
First I've heard of such news. What does that mean? Link please?
(Not affiliated)
https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2022/1-billion-wor...
Recent thread on Learning Blender 3D has me thinking that a kind of "Blender Mentor" exchange with live zoom critiques & happy hour may be fun ;)