Hello HN!
I am Ashley, author of the book Serverless Apps on Cloudflare, and I'm excited to share it with you and hopefully spread the awareness of the powerful and developer-focussed platform that Cloudflare has built, that I believe is currently flying under the radar!
For years, I've been building applications on Cloudflare - from websites, to APIs, to Discord bots and everything in-between. The platform has grown hugely in the past few years, to the point it has all the essential building blocks for modern applications. It's also built with engineers in mind, the developer experience (imo) is second to none. AWS is powerful, vast and very widely used, but I don't think anyone would shout about its developer experience in most cases.
Some of the features of the platform are incredibly unique and powerful. With a distributed architecture of many different services, you have to deal with services being down, or the network being down - with Bindings, you get a zero-cost abstraction to make inter-service calls between your different services (called Workers in Cloudflare) and they are automatically injected for you at runtime - no secrets, no credentials, no configuration - it just works. The same goes for databases, caches, queues and all the other supporting services you need - they all use bindings.
Everything runs seamlessly locally too, including databases, caches and everything else. No setup required, again, it just works and massively increases productivity and enjoyment when building applications. You don't need to worry about failover or redundancy, your application and resources are deployed and available globally, thanks to the edge network Cloudflare runs.
The pricing is great too, you only pay for what you use. For example, the CPU time you use in a Worker, you don't pay while your code waits on I/O (e.g. an API call), and there's zero egress fees.
Lastly, they have a very unique concept called Durable Objects. You can think of these like mini single-threaded servers, that act as a way to coordinate multiple clients or a single entity. You write them the same way you'd write a class in your code, and Cloudflare takes care of persisting those objects and hydrating them with state - as they come with built-in state too (key-value or SQLite). They also have native WebSocket support, allowing you to add WebSockets to your application in literally a few lines of code - they are super cool.
That's just a flavour of some of the cool offerings of the platform - if you want to learn more, it's available in eBook format via The Pragmatic Programmers (https://pragprog.com/titles/apapps/serverless-apps-on-cloudf...), as well as available to preorder in physical format via Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DFNTSMHP?maas=maas_adg_968101BB2...). It's content complete, and the beta tag will be removed in November.
Any questions or feedback, let me know!
