One build platform instead of two

Cloudflare is starting to merge its two serverless application products, Workers and Pages, into a single development platform. The announcement marks the first milestone in a convergence effort that will span the next several quarters, with the goal of eliminating the confusion developers face when choosing between the two products.

Workers began as a way to extend Cloudflare's CDN before growing into a general-purpose compute platform, while Pages started as a static hosting service and expanded in the Jamstack direction. Over time, each product adopted features from the other, blurring the line between them and making it hard to decide which one fits a given application.

Rather than forcing users to make tradeoffs between compute and static asset hosting, the unified platform will combine both, with integrated access to storage products like R2, Queues, and D1, plus tooling for CI/CD, git-based workflows, live previews, and environment configuration. The company says migration will be handled carefully: existing Pages and Workers projects will keep working without changes as new features roll out.

A new project model

The converged product introduces a redefined concept of a "project." A single project will be able to contain static assets, serverless functions (Workers), and resources, or any combination of the three. Cloudflare is also exploring automatic provisioning and direct integration with KV, Durable Objects, R2, and D1.

Deployments will keep versions of assets, functions, and resources in sync, so rollbacks and previews maintain a consistent state. The dashboard will eventually show all applications in one place rather than split between separate Pages and Workers sections.

Git-based deployments, one of Pages' standout features, will be available for the converged platform. Developers will be able to connect repositories containing any mix of assets, functions, and bindings, and use the same CI system Pages uses today. Preview deployments with unique URLs protected by Cloudflare Access will work as they do now, and environments will be a first-class concept for testing different setups.

Unified local development

The Wrangler CLI is expected to become a single, predictable interface for all projects, with commands like wrangler dev and wrangler deploy acting on the entire project, not just one component. A configuration file will cover the project and everything attached to it.

Benefits carried over from both products include globally distributed assets and compute running within 50ms of 95% of the internet-connected population, free egress, free static asset hosting, and a standards-based JavaScript runtime compatible with existing packages and libraries.

What's available today

Several changes are live now as the first step toward convergence:

  • Unified onboarding: The dashboard now presents a single creation flow where developers can start either a Pages project or a Worker from the same screen.
  • Template deployment: Starter templates ranging from a Hello World Worker to a ChatGPT plugin can be deployed in a couple of clicks. Dashboard-based Pages templates, which will automatically create a repo and deploy a full-stack app, are still in progress.
  • Framework-friendly CLI: A new CLI experience integrates with tooling from Angular, Next, Qwik, and Remix, and also supports deploying Workers from starter templates through a wizard-style flow.
  • Combined project list: The Pages and Workers project list dashboards have been merged, so all applications appear on a single page with unified usage analytics. Over time, these entries will be labeled simply as "projects" rather than as Pages or Workers.

Roadmap

As the convergence proceeds, features will gradually unlock across both products, such as git integration for Workers and a configuration file for Pages projects. Cloudflare is also collecting community input through a survey and invites discussion on its Developers Discord and Twitter account.