🎂 What Launched Today - Thursday, September 28

All right. Welcome to what launched today for Cloudflare Birthday Week 2023. My name is Leroy Lasenburg.

I'm the Senior Product Marketing Manager for the developer platform.

And today, as you may know, 2003 marks Cloudflare's 13th birthday. And each day this week, we're announcing a series of new products and now available for developers to get started building amazing applications.

Today we have our esteemed guests from our product team, Sam, Adam and John.

Say hello guys. And today we're going to share with you the latest news, product releases and announcements from Cloudflare.

We're announcing a series of product news to help developers start to build applications faster and improve the developer experience.

So today we're going to start with John.

John, tell us more about our latest announcement on Pages Build Caching and the new Supercharged Pages experience.

Hey, y'all. I'm John. I'm an team.

So Pages Build Caching is a new way to speed up your projects that are get connected on Cloudflare Pages.

So if you have a get connected project, you can go into your project settings today.

I'm going to build in the deployment section and enable Build Cache so long as you're using the V2 build system that is.

So what even is Build Caching?

So when Pages builds your project using our CICD product, we auto detect your tooling for you, figure out what package managers you might be using and intelligently run the appropriate install command to set up your project.

Then using your configured build command, we run your build. Now, most package managers will have a set of cache directories.

So NPM, whenever you install something, it saves a bunch of tar files in a cache directory so that you don't have to re-download those things.

What we do before we automatically run your installation step is to see if we have those cache files in our local cache.

And so we restore it.

We've seen project installation times for larger projects go from three minutes down to one minute.

For smaller projects, we're talking saving 10, 15, 20 seconds.

Pretty significant. And the other side of that is your build cache.

So for instance, if a framework like Gatsby builds your site, it will also include some build output that contains all your images that you may have processed during the build step.

And also there will be a cache directory there as well that Gatsby can use in between builds.

So after your build completes successfully, we take that cache and we ship it up to our servers.

And for your next build, it's ready to go to be restored and reduce your build times.

The amount of time that's going to save is going to vary from project to project.

But, you know, if you have a lot of image processing or any sort of heavy lifting that you're doing in your builds, then it can save a significant amount of time.

The projects the package managers that we support out of the box right now are npm, yarn, pnpm, and bun.

If you have a Next.js project or a Gatsby project or an Astro project, we also support build caching.

In the future, we'll support more package managers and more projects, including things like Jekyll or Ruby based sorry, Python based static site generators and such.

But as it stands now, we focus on the Node.js ecosystem and keep an eye out for improvements as we as we keep making them.

One last thing is that build caching is currently in beta. And I know I said it before, but if you're still on the V1 build system, please upgrade to V2 so you can try out build caching today.

And that's it. Awesome. Thanks, John. And be sure to get more details from my blog from birthday week, we can get more details and do a deeper dive into this announcements of pages build caching.

Alright, so next, we're going to go with Sam and Adam, we're going to talk about reintroducing the Cloudflare Workers playground.

Take it away, John. I'm sorry, Adam. Yeah, hi, I'm Adam Murray.

I am a PM on the workers team, specifically focused on developer productivity and experience.

And I'm joined by Samuel here. And we're going to talk about the workers playground.

We've had a workers playground in the past, back, I think, five years ago, when when workers was first announced, a playground came along with it.

And so what we've what we've done with the announcement today is we've released essentially everything that you have is an authenticated dashboard editor experience that we provide right now for users.

We've just we've moved that out into the unauthenticated experience.

And so what we're what we're trying to do is to give users an even faster way to get started with workers a way to, you know, maybe you can you can share these creations, you can deploy them instantly.

And, and it just gives you a way to like, maybe you've got a solution in your head that you just can't figure out how to do it, you can go play around with it.

You can have that shareable URL that you can bookmark for for the future, whether or not you want to share it with anybody or just yourself.

And then again, it's completely unauthenticated.

So once you kind of create your solution, you figure out what you want to do, you can go straight from that to deployment.

And again, always being our goal to get you from from from code to deploy in under a minute.

And we're really making it easier to kind of get started with workers as well.

All you need to go is go to your browser, type in workers.new.

And then within a couple seconds, you'll have a running worker in your browser editable.

And you can kind of play around, experiment with all the workers APIs, and then you know, share that with people.

But also then just go through deployment, as Adam said, and then deploy that as a real worker on your account and kind of make sure you're, you know, using all the other kind of Cloudflare developer platform resources.

And just briefly, can you talk a little bit more about the the new editor experience, how developers ultimately can get started with the playground, and then what kind of tools they can ultimately use within the playground?

Yeah, like Samuel said, the easiest way to get is to go to workers.new.

That'll open up the playground for you.

It's fully powered by VS Code code editor. So it should be something that you're familiar with.

It allows multi module editing. So you can just you can create multiple files and import them as you would in regular projects.

You've got your, you know, shows your errors, we got pretty error pages in there.

We've got our dev tools integration that the Authenticator users get, and that we also provide via Wrangler.

And so it should be enough to get you started and up and going for whatever project you want to create.

So, Samuel, anything you want to add to that?

Well, it doesn't have TypeScript, you are type checking the JavaScript files that you're writing.

So you can use JS doc to type check your worker, which is pretty cool.

And when developers are in the playground, how how easy or is it easy to share what they've created?

Well, you can copy the URL in your browser, or you can press the copy link button, which will copy it for you.

You can send that URL to someone else, and they can visit that in their browser, and they'll see the same marker that you're writing.

And as you write your worker, your URL will be updated.

So all you need to do is just share the URL of the page that you're on and someone else can see your worker.

So it's really good if you're on, you know, like sharing examples to try and fix someone's bug, or, you know, trying to reproduce a bug.

Yeah, so really easy to share workers. Yeah, the nice thing is those links don't expire either.

So as long as you have the link, you're good to go.

And again, visit our Cloudflare.com backslash birthday week to get more details from our blog regarding the playground and how to get started.

All right, and last but not least, we always get this question, especially on our Innovation Week, so what are the pricing implications of some of our announcements?

And we have an announcement on updating unbound pricing.

Adam and Sam, would you like to share?

Yeah, so you can go read this on the blog, but today Cloudflare announced new pricing for Cloudflare Workers and Pages functions, where you're actually just built on CPU time, and you're never billed for the idle time that your worker spends waiting on network requests or waiting on other external things.

You're literally just billed on usage. So unlike other platforms, when you build your applications, you're literally only paying for what you use, which is a problem.

Every other large serverless compute platform bills on how long your functions run, and it's this duration time, right?

And so that's a reflection of an abstraction and a has been required up to this point, but that's where we're changing things, right?

So with this, Cloudflare becomes the first and only serverless platform to offer standard pricing based on CPU time rather than duration, which is huge because it's more predictable.

It gives you more control. Essentially, what we're doing is we're saying, we want you to optimize your code.

We want you to optimize your applications.

And when you optimize those applications, you actually are going to spend less.

And that's just because we have the same values that you do, and that's to make efficient usage of compute resources all across the world.

And so workers pricing is taking away the bundled, unbound, the pricing models we had before and just going with a singular CPU-based model dramatically simplifies that.

And it also dramatically reduces your spend. So you should see that.

And again, you can go read the blog post for more examples specifically of what that spend is, but you'll notice in there examples that are pretty dramatic when you think about it.

And that's just one example. So spread that over time and you can see the savings really, really add up.

This is really helpful with things like AI applications where you're making a call to open AI and the call takes two seconds.

With other services, platforms, you're paying for that two seconds of duration, but with corporate workers, you're paying for the millisecond of parsing the JSON body, sending off to open AI, and you're not paying for that waiting time of that request coming back.

And when does the new pricing go into effect?

Yeah. So starting at the end of October, you'll be able to opt in individual workers and pages functions into this new.

So it'll be opt -in only.

If you are on a worker's paid plan, you'll have until March to switch that.

After which point, all the projects, everything will be automatically migrated after March.

So it should be noted that we talk about it's standard pricing based on CPU time and usage only.

That also comes with the $5 paid plan that we have a subscription, and then the request that we have.

The free plan is always a free plan. It hasn't changed.

You'll see that in the blog too, because we have a very, very generous free plan, and we intend to keep it that way.

All right. Well, thank you so much, guys, for sharing the announcements for today.

One thing that we like to do is, I would say, Cloudflare is turning 13, officially a teenager now.

What has been some of your favorite announcements over this week for develop...

I'm sorry, for birthday week?

Talking just this birthday week or past ones as well?

Just this one. Yeah. We're turning 13.

We're officially teenagers. What's going into our teenage years? I think the AI announcements have been pretty darn cool.

Yeah. Same here. Workers AI has been a huge announcement for me.

Really excited about that launch. Adam, Sam?

Yeah. I would say the workers pricing model, that's huge. It's such a win for our users.

I think when you look at all the things we've done with workers this week, I'm amazed at all the announcements we've had.

AI has been a huge part of that, but just our developer platform keeps growing.

Just the sheer amount of announcements and how quality they are is just awesome.

Sam?

Really good database stuff. We've got Hyperdrive launching. I think D1 and some vectorized database, lots of database stuff.

Very cool. All right. All right, guys.

Well, thank you again. As I said, the announcements are going out for this week.

We have one more day till the end of our birthday week with Cloudflare turning 13.

Be sure to tune in for the rest of the week for more news, announcements, and thought-provoking discussions with our product experts, our customers, and our industry peers.

Any last thoughts, guys? Anything you want to share before we end the session?

Happy birthday, Cloudflare.

Happy birthday, Cloudflare. There we go. Exactly.

That's how we sign off. Indeed. Thank you, guys, again for sharing your announcements.

Again, be sure to visit us at Cloudflare.com backslash birthdayweek2023 for all of the updates and latest releases and announcements on Cloudflare products for developers.

We look forward to seeing you guys again. Thank you, Adam, Sam, and John.

Thank you, guys, again for your time. Thanks, Leroy.