This feels like Cloudflare using the strangler pattern to continue their march into established cloud provider territory.
Their serverless implementation is outstanding - AFAIK, they're the only ones offering true scale-to-zero compute with no cold start delays. I've used it successfully to host an SSR app that hits an external API basically at no cost. If I'm reading this correctly, I can now move the API code into Cloudflare Workers as well, and just leave the database at the old provider, with the promise of much lower cost-for-performance for compute and better database performance. Sounds compelling and helps to move chunks of infrastructure to Cloudflare, who will undoubtedly introduce hosted relational databases in the future to complete the picture.
I'm unclear about the security implications though. My current database is in a private subnet, it would be unfortunate to have to open it up to the world to take advantage of this. The other downer is that Workers don't natively support .NET, so I can't make that move yet. But it's certainly intriguing!
> My current database is in a private subnet, it would be unfortunate to have to open it up to the world to take advantage of this.
Agreed, this is a big current limitation. As mentioned in the blog post, though, we'll be adding support for connecting into private networks via our other networking products (Cloudflare Tunnel and Magic WAN).
This is a solution to problem that does not exists. In database heavy apps the latency is the least of the concern. unless that architecture is not optimal in some cases to meet compliance.
What do you mean? The problem is single regional databases and speed of light.
Cloudflare moves the application closer to the end user, including the DB, to their edge network.
Additionally, what multiple regions solve ( mostly) is now solved in a simpler way. Cloudflare has no regions, it's a smart fix for a big problem.
I do wonder how they solve compliance ( eg. Storing data in a certain country and not abroad) as far as I knew they were working on it and they most definitely considered it in their design ( old blog post - or at least they are aware of the issue after talking with big enterprises), but I can't find a trace of it in their recent blog posts.
Their serverless implementation is outstanding - AFAIK, they're the only ones offering true scale-to-zero compute with no cold start delays. I've used it successfully to host an SSR app that hits an external API basically at no cost. If I'm reading this correctly, I can now move the API code into Cloudflare Workers as well, and just leave the database at the old provider, with the promise of much lower cost-for-performance for compute and better database performance. Sounds compelling and helps to move chunks of infrastructure to Cloudflare, who will undoubtedly introduce hosted relational databases in the future to complete the picture.
I'm unclear about the security implications though. My current database is in a private subnet, it would be unfortunate to have to open it up to the world to take advantage of this. The other downer is that Workers don't natively support .NET, so I can't make that move yet. But it's certainly intriguing!