CloudFlare has recently announced a breakthrough innovation called CloudFlare Workers, which allows customers to run JavaScript code at the edge. In the coming years, CloudFlare plans to support additional programming languages.
CloudFlare, one of the leading network security platforms in the industry has a global footprint of 117 PoPs. They provide CDN service, DNS, load balancing, SSL, DDoS protection, WAF, and a host of other premium value added services, protecting online companies against DDoS attacks, while improving website performance. Although the concept of edge compute is a relatively new to the CDN, CloudFlare is one of the first companies in the industry to embrace it. CloudFlare Service Worker gives developers the ability to modify a site’s HTTP request and response, make parallel requests, or generate responses from the edge. In addition, the Service Worker function is able to inspect HTTP requests and take actions on them. Thus, if a developer needs to enable IPv6, add or remove a DNS record, add a server to a load balancing configuration, enable a WAF rule, or change the rate limiting setting, the change is propagated worldwide in seconds. Here is a list of benefits for CloudFlare Workers, which will be available in beta in early 2018:
- Security: Customers can implement custom firewall rules
- Reliability: Customers can implement custom configurations to load balancing services
- Performance: Deploy custom logic that decides which content to cache at the edge
- Performance: Split request into parallel request to improve performance
