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Comment by z3t4 | Hacker News Reader

What do you guys use Cloudflare Workers for ?

I run multiple physical data centers with thousands of individual machines that operate autonomously. I proxy/cache API hits to the Github API so that each machine can download a small binary app that runs on each of them that works to ensure each machine is operating as it should.

It is a whole self-upgrade process that involves using Github CI to do the binary build on commit (and run the unit tests, of course) to produce a new version.

The app (running on each box) periodically queries a versions file stored in git (also proxied through a worker) so they know which build to download. I can segment versions of the app across CIDR so that I can do channel (alpha/beta/stable) based releases for testing.

It is a pretty epic solution since the workers only cost $5/month and totally saves my bacon with just a small bit of simple code.

The $5/month makes me suspicious. Is it really that cheap forever, or just until they capture enough of the market they can up that cost without people jumping ship.

The pricing is actually $0.15/million requests per month.

$5 is minimum monthly payment.

They also have a free plan with 100,000 requests per day.

I built an API proxy using a CF Worker today. The deploy takes only 2 seconds. Its speed is its killer feature.

See: https://workers.cloudflare.com/built-with

It's almost perfect for a url shortener, even with custom urls if paired with the kv store. Trivial, I know, but go look at what some people pay for these services.

Similar to URL shorteners, I've had cases where I wanted to allow users to create a “share link” that persists data in an app that otherwise didn't have persistence. Typically I've used a Lambda job that uploads to a public S3 bucket, but next time it comes up I plan to try Workers.

I've actually used it to bypass inherent (imo) shortcomings in Firebase dynamic links. And add custom functionality, such as allowing for single-letter query strings to append utm parameters (?t -> utm_source twitter). I also didn't want the smart detection it tries to use for mobile devices with its JS-enabled page, so the worker scrapes the correct URL from the page as well

I wish it wasn't based on a JS backend. For example, if you write Python, it gets translated to JS using Transcrypt. That just feels wrong to me.

Workers can run WASM (as can deno). So, you're right at home with c, cpp, and rust (and any other language that can compile to wasm)

Is that actually any slower? Python is so slow compared to JavaScript I wouldn't be surprised if transpiling it sped it up!

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