I’ve been using Cloudflare for DNS since time immemorial (2017 or so), but for the longest time I didn’t give much attention to their ever-expanding range of other services. Over the past few months, I’ve been tinkering with the Workers platform, and felt compelled to sing its praises.

Use cases

Workers are meant to run lightweight workloads at the edge, which is something one needs to account for when targeting the platform – heavy number crunching and other computatively intensive tasks are better suited for other runtimes.

But what if you want to host a lightweight API or a personal website? Run a timed script? Just serve some files?

Workers has your back, and the experience will be straightforward, frictionless, and affordable.

Value proposal

Cloudflare does not implement the deep, plug-into-everything model of the more IaaS focused platforms, but it covers a huge amount of ground without burying you in boilerplate.

The rather impressive toolbox of service bindings includes, among other things:

• KV storage for key/value lookups
• R2 object storage, an S3 compatible object storage with no egress fees
• D1 for SQL databases (disclaimer: I haven’t tried it personally, might suck)

And of course anything you deploy is automatically backed up Cloudflare’s big bad CDN, which alone is a already a huge benefit.

Developer UX

Cloudflare Developer Platform CLI interface Wrangler is excellent.
A capable adult can spin up a “hello world” and have it deployed and accessible on the interent in minutes. The defaults are sensible, and you don’t need to produce hundreds of lines of YAML before you’ve even written a single line of application code.

Local development is equally as smooth. Miniflare is bundled with Wrangler, and runs your Workers locally, emulating the necessary service bindings the code may depend on.
The overall flow is refreshingly simple: you write some code, run it locally, push it out globally, done.

For a concrete example, I recently rewrote a small personal project to run in Workers.

Pricing

Cost structure is almost comically straightforward compared to many other IaaS platforms.

There is a very serviceable free-tier, which in many cases is more than enough for personal websites and small projects. If you outgrow it, the paid plan is five bucks a month.
There are obviously some limits in the paid plan as well, but in my honest opinion they are transparent and quite generous.

Issues and negatives

First thing that comes to mind is language support. The choices are basically TypeScript, JavaScript, and to a limited extent Python (unless you want to juggle WebAssembly).

Then there’s the obvious question of performance: both CPU and execution time are capped, and especially in the free tier you can easily exhaust your limits if you don’t pay attention.

Another big thing is the platform ecosystem. I mentioned the impressive suite of tools before, but admittedly they are nowhere near as mature as what the large players like AWS or GCP provide.
Debugging can also be a little sparse: logs are serviceable, but without extra tooling the observability is not great.

Finally, the access control and permissions could be more granular. You basically have a single toggle that grants a user or an API token write permissions to every single worker on the account. Maybe not a huge problem for personal use (tough definitely not optimal), but can be a deal breaker in a professional / enterprise setting.

Final thoughts

Cloudflare Workers platform as a whole still has some growing up to do, but there is a lot to like already.

The developer UX is impeccable, pricing is affordable, and while it won’t work for every use case (being more akin to a razor blade than a Swiss Army knife), you should at least consider using it, because it’s great!