A Week of Developer-Focused Releases
Getting code from a local environment to a running, scalable service is rarely the clean part of development. Dependencies, builds, scaling, security, and deployment all stand between writing a function and watching it handle real traffic. Cloudflare is using its Developer Week 2021 to announce roughly 20 products and features aimed at removing those barriers, with a focus on its Workers platform.
Workers has been available since 2017, offering developers a way to deploy internet-facing applications that start instantly and scale globally. The platform has grown through additions like Workers KV for storage, Durable Objects for stateful compute, Workers Unbound for longer-running tasks, and triggers for non-HTTP events. The command-line tool wrangler handles deployment and logging, and the platform supports a range of languages.
The announcements this week are positioned to broaden the platform beyond Workers itself. Items previously in beta are expected to reach general availability and production readiness. Other releases will target specific use cases: making SaaS application deployment simpler, including support for vanity domains; building intelligent applications; expanding storage options; and improving observability and pricing. Cloudflare also plans tools to expose local applications to the internet more easily, plus additional partnerships.
The week includes a set of Developer Challenges on Cloudflare’s Discord channel. These are split into two tracks: one to introduce new users to Workers and its features, and another for experienced users to deepen their use of the platform. The underlying theme across the week is that deployment, scaling, and cold starts should not be the developer’s problem—writing code and running it securely at scale should be.
