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Cover image for Service Workers at Cloudflare

Service Workers at Cloudflare

K on March 17, 2018

Cover image by Christopher on Flickr Cloudflare has a new product, called Workers, they allow you to run JavaScript code on the Edge which is basi...
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Ben Halpern

Conceptually this is similar to how we use Fastly, using Varnish Configuration Language. Though I do appreciate the concept of using the same API at the edge compute node as well as on the browser.

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K

Interesting.

Reading about Lambda@Edge and Cloudflare Workers just introdruced me to this concept :D

But, well, guess I'm a front-end dev by heart

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Ben Halpern

I don't think these topics are super well understood, but dev.to is served from the edge, with some logic at that point, and then some more once the request hits the browser (service workers + local storage etc. to ultimately show the specific user their content as quickly as possible.)

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rhymes

Wow super interesting! I need to get more familiar with these concepts. Thanks

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Jonathan Bosanac

This is serverless compute or Function as a Service. Edge compute is AR, VR and compute at the actual edge. The CDN industry really confuses things.

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K

Guess people have different opinions about where the edge is, haha.

Some say it's the edge of their infrastructure.

Some say it's mobile devices.

Some say it's embedded devices.

Everybody wants to claim the edge :D

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Jonathan Bosanac • Edited

That is my point, it is confusing.

The "edge" is just the modern equivalent to DMARC or MPOE. There is a whole lot of network between your nearest proxy and the device.

As your company acquired Neumob, your network edge is not the proxy nearest to the device but the device itself.

I face the edge term challenge in presenting my company nuu:bit. We are software platform focused on content delivery and service chaining. We enable infrastructure providers to offer similar services (white label, etc). I have found that using edge compute to describe FaaS or serverless causes too much confusion.

-Jon

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K

Oh, I'm in no way associated with Cloudflare :)

But thank's for the insight, I think clear naming is important too.