Originally aired on November 15, 2021 @ 11:30 AM - 12:00 PM EDT
Join us for our Full Stack Week kick off introducing our Speaker Series, with our Director of Product, Rita Kozlov, and our Manager of Developer Advocacy, Kristian Freeman.
You can find all of the exciting products we're launching for Full Stack Week — and the schedule of CFTV sessions — at the Full Stack Week Hub .
All right. Hello, everyone. My name is Rita. I'm a director of product here at Cloudflare. And this week is Full Stack Week for us. So super excited to talk through what that means. And all of the well, not all the announcements we have this week, but might leave a few spoilers. So yeah, and then with me I have Kristian. Kristian, you want to introduce yourself? Hey, everyone. I'm Kristian Freeman. I manage our developer advocacy team. And yeah, super excited to talk about some but not all of the Full Stack Week things because we don't want to spoil everything. But yeah, should be a fun way to start the week. Yeah. So if you're familiar with Cloudflare you know that we do these innovation weeks where I mean, we make announcements year round. There's certainly no shortage of those. But around innovation weeks, we generally tend to make a series of announcements kind of around one topic. And so a few a month ago, a few weeks ago, we had birthday week where we made a whole bunch of announcements around email and R2 and object storage and all of that. Birthday week is generally kind of the thing that started that tradition of giving back to the Internet. And before that, we had speed week where we talked about all of the different performance improvements that we've been making. We had developer week earlier this year. So Full Stack Week is kind of also one of our innovation weeks. And really the idea is to bring forth kind of the question of like, what can you build on Cloudflare and talk about all of the different tools that we're providing to developers to allow them, yeah, to build on us. So we launched Workers in about 2017, which was kind of the first thing that allowed you to deploy logic to it. But there are so many other pieces that are required to deploy an application that we've seen our developers ask for. So yeah, excited to talk through all the ones that we'll be giving you access to this week. Yeah, real quick. One thing that Luke on my team, one of our developer advocates coined was the Cloudflare stack, which is like, how can you build everything you possibly can on tools like Pages and Workers and data tools that we have like KV and Drupal objects. And this week to me is like, continuing the story of the Cloudflare stack, which is like, how can you move everything that you possibly can onto Cloudflare and get all the benefits of building on our network. So there's just a lot of, everything really this week kind of is centered around that. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, Christian, you're probably one of the pioneers, I would say of starting to build on the Cloudflare stack. Maybe you can tell us a bit about some of the first things that you built on Cloudflare and then kind of how those have maybe evolved and changed and what are the things that you're building recently? Yeah. I mean, when I first joined, what was that? Two and a half years ago or something. That's been a long time now. A long time in Cloudflare terms, I guess. So the stuff I was initially building was a lot of kind of applying what I knew about front-end development and full-stack development to workers. And so understanding how building on the edge was different than traditional serverless and stuff like that. And as I got more comfortable with that, I moved into using KV in particular a lot. I really, still really love KV and use it for all kinds of things. But I think the thing that probably more than anything was a really big quality of life improvement was Pages. Coming from a full-stack background, I can deploy serverless functions. I'm familiar with that. But when I was kind of getting used to workers, I was using worker sites a lot, which was kind of our initial version of that, but really wanted all of the Jamstack workflow stuff. And so Pages was one really big unlock. And then the other thing was like, okay, now I'm ready to build serious applications. KV is good for a particular kind of data tool, but sometimes I want like SQL. So a couple of months ago, I actually did some stuff with connecting workers to Postgres using Cloudflare Tunnel and a bunch of other tools. But today we announced, and I'm sure we'll talk about this, some more kind of built-in like first-party support for this stuff that I'm really excited about. So it's stuff that I kind of duct taped together on my own, and now I'm excited to see us really focus on it and build something that people can rely on in their production apps. Yeah. Well, specifically, I think data is probably one of the areas where it's kind of the least explored space and where it feels like there's so much ahead of us. But even today, yeah, we made at least four announcements around different ways that you can access data and connect to data. So we'll talk about that a bit more, I think, in a bit here. But first I wanted to set the context and give folks an opportunity to, yeah, understand kind of how these weeks work and all of the different activities that will be going on this week and help you all follow along as we make these announcements. So first thing we're going to do is we have actually a hub for full stack week that you can check out. And in that hub, we're going to post up links to all of the blog posts, all of the upcoming speakers that we have today. So we'll go over those. Yeah. So Christian is going to show it off right now. Yeah. So it's Cloudflare.com slash full stack week. That's like full dash stack dash week. Is that a dash? Is that a hyphen? I don't know what the technical term is, but I think they're the same. But actually if you go to the Cloudflare homepage, if you're going to click on that logo up top, yeah. Exciting. Okay. That's even easier. Cloudflare.com. There you go. Yeah. So we're going to update this page with all of the announcements and blog posts that we have coming out throughout the week. So believe it or not, this is just two days for the blog posts. Really, I guess what this first post is from yesterday, but this is like one day's worth of blog posts for us where we go a little crazy here during innovation week and just publish anything and everything. Yeah. We have a speaker series. Can we pause here for a second, actually? Yeah. Yeah. So the first thing that you'll kind of see here is the announcements that we made today, right? So introducing the database connectors, support for Mongo and Prisma, Durable Objects GA, and kind of painting the future for what sockets are going to look like with workers. Another cool thing that we're doing this week is actually highlighting what people are already building on the Cloudflare stack. So we're going to do one of these developer spotlights, I think every single day this week. And yeah, the idea is, first of all, none of this would be nearly as fun if no one was using it, right? So we really appreciate our community and everyone who builds on workers today. And it's always so inspiring every time we see a blog post or someone posts in the Discord, what I've built channel or anything like that to see, wow, people are building incredible applications on this. So yeah, every day we're going to do a developer spotlight. So those are going to be in here as well. Yeah. Yeah. I helped with some of these developer spotlights. There's some really cool ones coming up of just, I mean, this one is really interesting too. We can talk about that, but like, there's just a lot of people really pushing the boundaries of what you can do with workers and Durable Objects and Pages and KB and really like all over the ecosystem. So yeah. Did you want to talk about these blog posts? Should we plug the speaker series first? What do you think we should do order wise? It's too much to talk about. It is a lot to talk about. Let's kind of do our run through of the whole thing first and then we'll dive deeper into each of the things. So let's introduce the developer speakers series. Yeah, sure. Yes. Let me. So here's us right now introducing Cloudflare. Oh, we're really excited for the speaker series. We're going to be bringing, I think it's 18 speakers as the final count over the next two days. And we're going to be having people from all over the world talking about all kinds of different web development and I guess just general software development stuff live on Cloudflare TV, which is where you are right now. So to say basically right after this, it'll get started. We're super excited about it. And yeah, I mean, I don't know. Do you want to go through the talks individually? I don't know if we have time for that. I guess I think about it, but you know, there's all kinds of stuff about like Jamstack security, for instance, with James Quick here. Some timely stuff about databases right from Erwin who's here at Cloudflare and then Matthew from Prisma. So really like all kinds of topical stuff. Maybe we should take a sec to talk about these. Since people can kind of go and check out the schedule here, but these are kind of a unique thing we're doing this week. Yeah, that's true. I must admit, looking at the speaker series, I get a little starstruck. So many people have been following for years. So it's exciting to have them come on Cloudflare TV and talk about actually the ways they're using workers. Yeah. So every day we're also going to do a highlight of what was launched on that particular day. So if you're interested in hearing more specifically about today's announcements, Greg, Kabir, and Erwin, and I think actually James Snell will be on today as well. Yeah. To talk about the announcements today. And then we also have Vanessa who's going to talk about how they're using durable objects at Croquet, which is super cool. Yeah. And a couple other highlights of the stories today with, as you mentioned, Matthew from Prisma. Yeah. But the launch sessions I always find really interesting. And the thing is, yeah, with the PMs going in and talking about it, you kind of get a little sneak peek of what it's like behind the curtains too, and why we're building these things and how it all came to be and how we go about it. Yeah. I mean, I think particularly getting that insight is super interesting. I mean, the blog posts are always great, but there's something fun about just kind of hearing people's thought process of how they think through, yeah, think through all the different things that we're releasing. And it's probably not clear here from the schedule because this is just Monday. And then Tuesday, we have some more talks down here, but we're doing those product segments every single day. So each day, the authors will be on that call and then we'll have someone kind of emceeing and asking questions. And I imagine taking questions as well, if you'd like to submit questions via Cloudflare TV. So I always really enjoy that. And I think it's a great way. If you want to read through all the blog posts, of course you can, and we encourage you to, but if you just want to kind of have a 30 minute condensed take from each of the PMs, I think that's a really great way to kind of stay up to date as well. Yeah. And then other ways to participate in the weeks that we'll plug. So first of all, come join our Discord. I think it's a really fun and exciting community. Everyone is going to be really, really friendly. So if you go to workers .community, that will redirect you to the Discord invite. But yeah, we'll be discussing many of the different announcements in there. If you're trying things out, hopefully not running into any issues, but if there's anything that we can help with, yeah, please feel free to come in and drop us a note. And then we'll be posting the announcements as they come up in there. So that's another way, if you're kind of trying to figure out how do I keep up with all this stuff, because it's day one and you guys already made so many announcements, that's a good way to do it. And then I think tomorrow we'll be doing Twitter spaces as well. If anyone wants to come hang out with our team and ask questions, and yeah, it's another great way to get involved in the community too. Yeah. So follow us. I think I can pull it up. Let's see. Twitter.com slash cloud. Nope. Can't type. Live typing is so hard. You know, at Cloudflare Dev on Twitter, we'll be sharing that there and we'll be trying to get all of the developer advocacy team on there. Rita will be there. Hopefully some PMs as well. That's the thing with Twitter spaces. You kind of never know who's going to show up, but that should be really fun. And then on Friday, speaking of the Discord, which again, you can join at workers.community. We're going to be doing a community call there as well in our Discord, which is something we do on a monthly basis, but we're having a kind of special full stack week edition to sort of summarize everything that's happened over the week. If we can possibly do that in an hour, we'll try our best. There'll be a lightning round. But yeah, it should be a lot of fun. Yeah, this is going to be really fun. Should we dive in and talk about some of the announcements today? So most of the announcements today relate to, I think, kind of the most foundational. We talk about the full stack, right? And giving developers all of the different primitives and pieces for how they can build on our network. And data is kind of the very, very foundational piece of it, right? Whenever I send someone a message, it needs to be stored somewhere. Whenever I access an account, my information needs to be stored somewhere about that. Yeah, kind of even for things like small widgets on sites, if you liked or favored something, that needs to persist somewhere as well. So today we talk about all the different ways in which we're allowing you to do that. And the first announcement was introducing relational database connectors. So actually, I'd be interested to hear from you, Christian. You've been developing for a long time. Do you remember what the first database was that you interacted with? Probably Postgres, coming from a Ruby on Rails background, which has very serious database integrations. It was either Postgres or SQLite, for sure. So it was definitely SQL. I've more recently done stuff with NoSQL, but I came up with Postgres and stuff like that. So yeah, this announcement is very up my alley. I will happily connect directly to a Postgres database from inside my worker. I'll have no problem whatsoever with that. Yeah. So building a Twitter clone using Postgres, that was my first lesson in databases. That's so cool. Can you tell us a bit about the architecture of it? If you remember. Yeah, I'm trying to remember. It's been a while now. This is with the Rails tutorial, which is a very famous guide in the Rails world. But in Postgres, you basically have users and, let's see, and posts. I mean, it's basically how you can imagine Twitter being architected. I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, in production or whatever. But yeah, it was great. My brain, for whatever reason, relational databases really clicked. That was a really big thing for me when I understood that I felt like I could build anything. Honestly, I was like, wow. I started seeing... In the matrix, when he starts seeing all the code or whatever, that's how I felt with relational databases. I would go to any website and I'd be like, oh my gosh, I get it. I get how this is built. Since then, I think I mentioned earlier, when I was working on my very hacked together duct tape solution of Postgres inside of a worker, I think it's just the way that I think about building basically any serious application is I generally wanted to have Postgres under the hood. This stuff makes a ton of sense to me. I think a thing that if you've been building on workers for a while, like for me, using KB a lot, the next sort of... The holy grail for me is Postgres under the hood and then using KB and durable objects as augmenting on top of that. So doing things like caching or taking things out of Postgres when it makes sense for speed and scalability purposes and using durable objects for that. There's so many opportunities to mix and match these things. And that's what I'm really excited about. We could definitely go a route of never talking about databases at all, but that's not realistic for people. Everyone uses databases at the end of the day. So I think it makes a ton of sense. The strategy of, hey, not only do you have KB and stuff like that, but you can still connect to your databases and here's a really great API to do that. Yeah. I think one of the things that excited me about this was we talked about dogfooding at Cloudflare quite a bit. And so we're always drawing inspiration from what our team's using to build stuff today. And Cloudflare kind of has two components. The one that users are generally most familiar with and the one that you kind of log on to use is obviously the network itself. But in order for you to do that, you have to use our website and configure things, right? And so a lot of our backends and APIs are backed by Postgres today. And so I'm thinking about how do we enable more teams to build on workers? A really common ask that our team would get was, okay, well, I have a Postgres database and I kind of understand that really well. Some teams are able, depending on what they're building, like KB maybe is perfectly suitable or durable objects. But there are relational databases exist for a reason and they're really handy specifically for maintaining all of the different configuration that users make. And yeah, so it's exciting to be able to empower those teams to build on Cloudflare. And as you said, there are kind of some more future looking things like durable objects and like we're going to talk about TCP workers too. And that's like a world in which like everything is fully on the edge. I'm personally really excited about as a user of the Internet, because everything's just going to be so snappy fast. But you also have to be practical. And today there's just so much that's done through Postgres and MySQL. And yeah, MySQL is the first database that I ever used. Actually more specifically MariaDB, basically the same. So yeah, if we can help folks in their day-to-day job and even offloading some tasks to workers. And I think there are some improvements that we can build into it too in the future, right? Where like maybe it's not on the edge all the time, but we can cache things to make them faster. We can move the worker to be closer to the database so that actually that connection is open and can query things really quick and then respond through. It might sound pretty simple, but even in that realm of like, hey, I have a database and the logic is running on a worker, there's like so much runway to improve things. Yeah. I mean, it reminds me of like back when we announced like scheduled workers, we talked about the possibility for like using that for like recurring tasks and stuff like that. And coming from like a Ruby background, that story is very well told. Now that we have database connectors, like workers is even better for that kind of thing too. Like there's just constant like use cases all over the place. Like, hey, now that there's scheduled workers and database connectors, like why not deploy a worker that runs every hour to do all your stuff? And you can connect directly to the database so that there's no sort of like compromises or like weird REST API kind of stuff you have to set up. Like it just works like you would expect it to. So yeah, I think it's really great. And I guess maybe if we scroll down, I believe there's like a couple call to actions here if people are interested that we should probably point them to. So I think there's a forum here for beta signup. Is that right, Rita? That's right. Yeah. And then as you also mentioned, join us on the Discord, workers.community, or there's an invite link here. And then we also have an example code base that you can get started with. It's actually like a full tutorial, which is great. Shout out to Adam on my team who wrote this. But yeah, you can get started querying your Postgres database directly from a worker using all of our new exciting tech. Yeah. So just to help folks disambiguate, the reason that we have the signup forum is like I mentioned, we're not even nearly done with this use case alone. And so we want to hear from people what they care about the most, right? And what we want to improve first. But you can actually get started using this today, which is why we have the example and demo. Yeah. If you have Postgres or MySQL database today, you don't have to wait for someone to respond to you on the forum. Yeah. That's a good call out for sure. Cool. Should we take a look at some of the other ones? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I get carried away. Me too. Yeah. No worries. What should we cover next? Should we go in order? Mongo and Prisma? Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I guess Greg and Kabir and folks will be covering all of these in even more depth in a few hours here. But yeah, it's first of all, cool. A few of our team members come from Mongo. So I'm sure it's... I know it's a bit of a... Greg, who wrote this blog post, in fact. I'm sure it's exciting for them to see kind of the two worlds come together. But yeah, I'm excited. I'm really excited about Prisma too. So many folks are building on top of it today and just makes actually getting started with SQL databases so, so much easier. So yeah, I've seen a lot of people in the past ask about, can I talk to my worker? Can I talk to Prisma from my worker? And yeah, I think it's really cool. And also Greg will be presenting a talk at Prisma's conference this week specifically about this too. So plugging that in. I can't remember what day it is. I think we can share it on our Twitter. That's right. Yeah. This is a story I think we'll continue to tell later in the week with the posts that I have coming out where it's really exciting to see companies investing in having their stuff work with the workers platform. So removing some of their node dependencies and things like that and building stuff that is both browser and workers native. It's a really great... It's not just good for workers users. It benefits everyone in the demo. I know Prisma and Mongo are both things that people talk about constantly in our Discord. So it'll be great to be able to point people to those resources and use them just to get started. Let's get building, get deploying this data driven stuff. So I think this will be really great. I agree. We also have our first viewer question. Oh, cool. We don't have a ton of time, but I think it's worth pausing to see if we can answer it. So someone is asking, any recommendations on where to host a database? Christian, have you got any? Well, Prisma... Sorry. Mongo comes with... It's specifically Mongo Atlas, which is talked about here, is managed, right? Right. I think both of these are, right? I believe. For Postgres and MySQL, I'll just tell you what I use, which is Heroku. I don't know if that's still the cool answer, but it's what I've always used. I know there's also just a lot of great... It's actually with Docker and stuff like that, it's not super hard to just spin something up yourself, honestly, and just deploy it somewhere. But yeah, that's my tried and true, literally for a decade answer, but I don't know if there's a new or cooler one. Do you know, Rita? No, I've used Heroku in the past as well. I definitely tend towards the probable least resistance. Yeah. Yeah, totally. So if you come in our discordworkers .community, I'm sure there's got to be people there who know the new cool things, but you could also just go with the one that Rita and I have relied upon and trusted. But I do hope to eventually answer that with Cloudflare, obviously. For sure. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Good question, though. All right. We only have a couple of minutes here, so I don't think we'll be able to go through the other announcements in as much detail. So maybe we can just... In case people missed the initial thing, we're going to be having a segment later in the day with the authors of all these blog posts who will talk about these things, probably much more coherently than Rita and I are. It'll be a good way to get in the product mindset and understand why we're building this stuff too. And that is at, I believe it's 1230 Pacific time. Let me go down here and look at the schedule. So yeah, that should be great. So I guess, should we kind of get ready to intro people to the speaker series? Because that's going to be starting here in what, a minute and a half, basically? Yeah. So starting in a minute and a half, we're going to have our speaker series starting with Gift, who is an excellent, excellent speaker. And I can't wait to watch her presentation. Yeah. So everything is going to be on Cloudflare.tv. So it should be super easy to tune in. Yeah. Come hang out with us in the Discord if you want to talk about it as it's happening live. I know I love to live stream my stream of consciousness as I watch talks. I feel like, oh, that thing is really cool. And I want to use that. Totally. Yeah. And I'll mention also, there's links here to each of the individual event or talk pages. And one really great thing about our amazing Cloudflare.tv team is if you're unable to make some of these talks, I believe that they'll be ready for rewatch pretty quickly. I don't want to say immediately, but very quickly. So in case one of these is too late in the day for you or too early in the day for you, you can always come back and rewatch them. But definitely stick around. We have literally a full, full day's worth of talks right after this. We're super excited about. Yeah. And then we have a full week of announcements ahead of us as well. I can't believe it's only Monday. I know. Yeah. Time flies when you're having fun. I'm sure Friday will be here in a blink of an eye. So. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much, everyone, for joining us. We hope you enjoy this week and the announcements and all the speakers. And from here, we'll hand it over to Awesome. Thank you, everyone. Have a good full stack week.
