Post Syndicated from Dawn Parzych original https://blog.cloudflare.com/platform-week-2022-wrap-up/

A comprehensive developer platform includes all the necessary storage, compute, and services to effectively deliver an application. Compute that runs globally and auto-scales to execute code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure; storage for user information, objects, and key-value pairs; and all the related services including delivering video, optimizing images, managing third-party components, and capturing telemetry.

Whether you’re looking to modernize legacy backend infrastructure or are building a brand-new application from the ground up the Cloudflare Developer Platform provides all the building blocks you need to deliver an application on the edge.

Recently, during Platform Week, we made a number of announcements expanding what’s possible with the Developer Platform. Let’s take a look at some of the announcements we made and what this enables you to build. For a complete list visit the Platform Week hub.

Compute

The core of our compute offering is Workers, our serverless runtime. Workers integrates with other Cloudflare offerings helping you route requests, take action on bots, send an email, or route and filter emails, just to name a few.

There are times when you’ll want to use multiple Workers to perform an action, Workers now have the ability to call another Worker. And while that Worker is sitting idly you aren’t charged. If serverless computing is about paying for what you use, why should you be charged when a Worker is waiting for a response?

Serverless compute works great for an application that’s in production, but what about when you’re in development?  You need the ability to run and test locally, that’s why we’ve announced that the Workers runtime will be available via an open-source license later this year.

But it’s not just the flexibility to run locally that’s important, the worry of vendor lock-in is real. You need the ability to move your application without significant efforts, that’s where the WinterCG comes in. Cloudflare is working with core contributors from Deno and Node.js to create server-side API standards to enable just this.

Storage

Applications, of course, cannot exist without storage. And when it comes to storage, there is no one-size-fits-all solution: object storage is great for images, but maybe not for storing user information; meanwhile, databases are great for storing user information, but not videos, and even when it comes to databases, there are so many kinds.  Developers need a variety of storage solutions, there’s no one-size-fits all storage offering.

As of Platform Week we expanded our storage products, to include R2 (which is now in beta), and D1 SQLite database. These are in addition to the existing products, such as Workers KV, Durable Objects, and even Cloudflare’s cache!

You have the flexibility to choose the right tool for the task. Part of being flexible means, not encountering egress charges to access or move your data, and you should always have the ability to integrate with whichever tool you want.

Developer Services

The Developer Platform doesn’t end with the compute power and storage. It also includes a full range of services to build your Jamstack application, optimize the images you serve, and stream videos.

Pages simplifies the build and deploy process for Jamstack applications. Too much time is spent waiting. Waiting for builds to compile, when only a few lines of code were changed only to find out there was an error. Pages now reduces your waiting time with a new build infrastructure, and the ability to view logs as a build is in progress to immediately see if something has gone wrong. (And speaking of logs, did you know you can store your logs on R2?)

To get started with Pages, you can either use our Git-integrations or deploy pre-built assets directly. Functionality on your static sites can be extended via Workers or the new Pages Plugins.

If you don’t have a Jamstack application, we still have services related to media (which is an essential part of any website). Store, resize, and optimize your Images or deliver live streams.

In addition to building and delivering the applications there is a host of observability solutions to view how everything is performing. The reliability of your systems is impacted when you don’t have visibility into how they are performing. We continue to expand the tools available to track performance of your applications through internal tools and partnerships. Logpush for Workers, Pub/sub, and Workers Analytics Engine are the latest additions giving you the ability to publish, gather, and process events, telemetry or sensor data, and create visualizations from the data.

Application and network services

The benefits of building on the Cloudflare Developer Platform is the interoperability of solutions within our application and network services.

With the beta release of R2 we also announced Cache Reserve. When content is expired or evicted from our CDN a cache reserve can be configured in R2 to stay in-network and avoid having to pay egress fees refreshing content from the origin.

Connectivity and communication across distributed systems requires network address translation. Magic NAT makes it easy for systems to communicate across private subnets with overlapping IP space without having to backhaul traffic, deploy gateways in multiple zones, incur fees, or deal with latency.

Ecosystem of providers

It’s not enough to have a suite of tools and services, you need to integrate and extend them with your existing vendors. The Developer Platform Ecosystem exists to do exactly this. We continue to expand our directory giving you the peace of mind that the Cloudflare Developer Platform will work for you.

How this all fits together

Whether you want to modify requests or responses on their way to or from the origin, build a Jamstack application, or build an entire dynamic application without any origin the Cloudflare Developer Platform has what you need. Instead of serving your application from a single region where your servers are, you can serve your application from “Region Earth.”

The applications you can build are limitless with compute, storage, and comprehensive developer services. Build your app, maintain state, upload your images directly to R2 and have them optimized via Images before being delivered by the CDN.

Unnecessary human decisions such as which region your objects should be stored in, become system decisions when the region is chosen automatically based on a request. When cached content is expired or evicted from cache, Cache Reserve is there to retrieve the object locally from R2 instead of traversing the Internet to the origin.

Once you have the application up and running you can visualize events and telemetry to ensure a reliable and fast application.

Here’s a small sample of what you can do with the Developer Platform:

• Build a collaborative app like a multi-player Wordle game.
• Deliver a newsletter, allow users to sign up using Oauth. Or aggregate articles into a newsfeed.
• Create a website with up-to-date train departures and arrivals.

With over 35 announcements made during Platform Week we can’t wait to see what you’re going to build.

Post Syndicated from Dawn Parzych original https://blog.cloudflare.com/developer-platform-ecosystem/

Deploying an application to the cloud requires a robust network, ample storage, and compute power. But that only covers the architecture, it doesn’t include all the other tools and services necessary to build, deploy, and support your applications. It’s easy to get bogged down in researching whether everything you want to use works together, and that takes time away from actually developing and building.

Cloudflare is focused on building a modern cloud with a developer-first experience. That developer experience includes creating an ecosystem filled with the tools and services developers need.

Deciding to build an application starts with the planning and design elements. What programming languages, frameworks, or runtimes will be used? The answer to that question can influence the architecture and hosting decisions. Choosing a runtime may lock you into using specific vendors. Our goal is to provide flexibility and eliminate the friction involved when wanting to migrate on to (or off) Cloudflare.

You can’t forget the tools necessary for configuration and interoperability. This can include areas such as authentication and infrastructure management. You have multiple pieces of your application that need to talk with one another to ensure a secure and seamless experience. We support and build standards for compatibility and to simplify the configuration and interoperability when deploying your applications.

During the build process and after your application has been deployed, it is essential to test and verify that things are working properly. This is where logging, analytics, and alerting come in. Having the ability to quickly be notified when something isn’t working properly is part of the equation. The other part is reducing the context switching among various debugging tools and applications to quickly resolve the issue.

And finally, improving your application through iterating and extending functionality. This can come from adding plug-ins from third party providers, running A/B tests to determine whether a feature is moving in the right direction, or not.

At Cloudflare our mission is to help build a better Internet, all of these elements are necessary to achieve this. Our focus is on providing the network, storage, and compute power to deliver apps. We look to partners to help in the other areas and provide an ecosystem. Our intention with this strategy is to get out of the way, so developers can build faster and safer.

To achieve our mission we look for partners with similar philosophies. We’ve previously announced integrations around

• Content platforms to help with the planning, creating and building of applications.
• Database connectivity
• And observability to assist with debugging and troubleshooting

Everything we do is built on the foundation of the open Internet and open standards. We want to provide choice to developers to pick from a variety of tools and may the best solution win. We believe developers should have the freedom and flexibility to choose the best tool ‘for their work’ not the best for within a ‘locked-in-platform’.

We understand that partnering is key to achieving the above goal. Today, we’re excited to announce a growing ecosystem of partners who are tapping into our world’s best network. Our developer platform products and partner products fit seamlessly into existing stacks and improve developer productivity through simple development and deploy workflows.

Source, build and deploy partners:

Along with having the best network in the world, we also have really good compute and database products. However, for developers to plan, build and continuously iterate, they need a host of other services to work together seamlessly to have a great building experience end to end. This is why we partnered with DevOps platforms and CMSs to make the entire development lifecycle better.

On the DevOps front, developers can create new Pages projects by connecting thier repos stored on GitLab or GitHub and make site changes there via the usual git commands.

“Developers can be more productive when they create, test, secure, and deploy software from a single DevOps application instead of bouncing between multiple different tools. Cloudflare Pages’ integration with GitLab makes it easier for joint users to develop and deploy new code to Cloudflare’s network using the same syntax and git commands they’re already comfortable using.”
— Michael LeBeau, Alliance Manager at GitLab

Also, on the CMS front, we have built deploy hooks that are the key to what allows developers to connect and trigger deployments in Cloudflare Pages via updates made in their favorite headless CMSs.

“With this integration, our customers can work more efficiently and cross-functionally with their teams. Marketing teams can update Contentful directly to automatically trigger deployments without relying on their developers to update any of their code base, which results in a better, more productive experience for all teams involved.”
— Jeff Blattel, Director of Technical Partnerships at Contentful

“We’re delighted to partner with Cloudflare and excited by this new release from Cloudflare Pages. At Sanity, we care deeply about people working with content on our platform. Cloudflare’s new deploy hooks allow developers to automate builds for static sites based on content changes, which is a huge improvement for content creators. Combining these with structured content and our GROQ-powered Webhooks, our customers can be strategic about when these builds should happen. We’re stoked to be part of this release and can’t wait to see what the community will build with Sanity and Cloudflare!”
— Even Westvang, Co-founder, Sanity.io

“At Strapi, we’re excited about this partnership with Cloudflare because it enables developers to abstract away the complexity of deploying changes to production for content teams. By using the Deploy Hook for Strapi, everyone can push new content and updates quickly and autonomously.”
— Pierre Burgy, CEO, Strapi.io

Database partners:
We’ve consistently heard a common theme: developers want to build more of their applications on Workers. In addition to having our own first-party solutions such as Workers KV, Durable Objects, R2 and D1 we have also partnered with best-of-breed data companies to bring their capabilities to the Workers developer platform and open up a wide variety of use cases on Workers.

“With Cloudflare and Macrometa, developers can now build and deliver powerful and compelling data-driven experiences in a way that the centralized clouds will never be able to. The world deserves a better cloud – an edge cloud.”
— Chetan Venkatesh, Co-founder/CEO, Macrometa

“The integration of Cloudflare workers with Fauna allows our joint customers to simply and cost effectively bring both data and logic to the edge. Fauna was developed from the ground up as a globally distributed, serverless database and when combined with Cloudflare Workers serverless compute fabric provides developers with a simple, yet powerful abstraction over the complexities of distributed infrastructure.”
— Evan Weaver, Co-founder/CTO, Fauna

Debugging, analytics, troubleshooting partners:
Troubleshooting is key in the developer workflow. True observability means having an end-to-end view of an entire system, inclusive of third-party integrations and deployments. By combining real-time data with data from other logging and monitoring endpoints, customers can get robust, instant feedback into how their website and how applications are performing all in one place.

“Teams using Cloudflare Workers with Splunk Observability get full-stack visibility and contextualized insights from metrics, traces and logs across all of their infrastructure, applications and user transactions in real-time and at any scale. With Splunk Observability, IT and DevOps teams now have a seamless and analytics-powered workflow across monitoring, troubleshooting, incident response and optimization. We’re excited to partner with Cloudflare to help developers and operations teams slice through the complexity of modern applications and ship code more quickly and reliably.”
— Jeff Lo, Director of Product Marketing, Splunk

“Maintaining a strong security posture means ensuring every part of your toolchain is being monitored – from the datacenter/VPC, to your edge network, all the way to your end users. With Datadog’s partnership with Cloudflare, you get edge computing logs alongside the rest of your application stack’s telemetry – giving you an end to end view of your application’s health, performance and security.”
— Michael Gerstenhaber, Sr. Director, Datadog

“Reduce downtime and solve customer-impacting issues faster with an integrated observability platform for all of your Cloudflare data, including its Workers serverless platform. By using Cloudflare Workers with Sumo Logic, customers can seamlessly correlate system issues measured by performance monitoring, gain deep visibility provided by logging, and monitor user experience provided by tracing and transaction analytics.”
— Abelardo Gonzalez, Director of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

“Monitoring your Cloudflare Workers serverless environment with New Relic lets you deliver serverless apps with confidence by rapidly identifying when something goes wrong and quickly pinpointing the problem—without wading through millions of invocation logs. Monitor, visualize, troubleshoot, and alert on all your Workers apps in a single experience.”
— Raj Ramanujam, Vice President, Alliances and Channels, New Relic

“With Cloudflare Workers and Sentry, software teams immediately have the tools and information to solve issues and learn continuously about their code health instead of worrying about systems and resources. We’re thrilled to partner with Cloudflare on building technologies that make it easy for developers to deploy with confidence.”
— Elain Szu, Vice President of Marketing, Sentry

“Honeycomb is excited to partner with Cloudflare as they build an ecosystem of tools that support the full lifecycle of delivering successful apps. Writing and deploying code is only part of the equation. Understanding how that code performs and behaves when it is in the hands of users also determines success. Cloudflare and Honeycomb together are shining the light of observability all the way to the edge, which helps technical teams build and operate better apps.”
— Charity Majors, CTO & Co-Founder, Honeycomb

And we are just getting started. Over the last 10 years, Cloudflare has built one of the fastest, most reliable, and most secure networks in the world. We are now enabling developers to build on that network using best in class products seamlessly. Visit our Developer Platform Partner Ecosystem directory for more information on integrations.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to partner with us, reach out to us by filling out this quick form.