💻 Welcome to Developer Week 2022

Hello and welcome to Developer Week 2022. I am Don Perske. I am the director of Product Marketing for the Developer Platform and I'm here today with Rita. Rita, do you want to introduce yourself? Hello. Hello. Happy Developer Week. I'm Rita. I'm a senior director of Product, also on Workers, our developer platform. Great. Very exciting week ahead of us with Developer Week. This week we are talking about all the primitives and building blocks that you need to build, deliver, run applications on the Cloudflare network. So we've divided the week into a couple of themes. So you'll see a lot of posts coming out around a series of ideas. And one of the first ones we're kind of talking about as of today is a compute of the future. So Rita, like, Super Cloud and tell us what this thing is. Great question. So I'll start with talking about maybe what it isn't and how we got here. Right. So the first iteration of the cloud, the. way. That we think about it, at least still kind of fell short in some ways of, I think, developers expectations, right? Yes, huge, huge improvement over having to set up a server. So I'm glad that most of us don't have to do that anymore. And huge thank you to everyone who works at cloud providers that do that on our behalf. Right. But you still kind of have to think about all of these other things like where your application is going to run and how you're going to scale it and things like concurrency. And there have been these concepts that have been hovering around this idea. So for example, serverless, right? The aim of that whole movement and the whole concept was to get away from still having to manage many of these things. But at the end of the day, it's still abstractions on top of the fact that the cloud is really just running in a few regions that you do have to select, and that's how code gets scheduled and gets scheduled and containers that have quite a bit of overhead. And so five years ago we announced Workers, which runs on Cloudflare's network. And it's been really interesting to see how actually recently more and more providers started talking about the edge and how things are running there. But in a way, we found that to also be a little bit limiting and on one hand it's a great improvement, I still think, over the traditional cloud computing model where you have to think about regions in that on the edge, right? Your compute will run close to the user. And so that gives you things like performance out of the box because you don't have to create a bunch of instances. And like every single region that a cloud provider has and do load balancing and all of this complicated stuff in order to get there, you just kind of get there from day one. But not all applications need to necessarily run near the user, and that's not even the right thing to do for every type of architecture or every single use case. So just to give you an example, applications that interact with data a lot, if I. have. A database right, and then I have my code that's interacting with it and I need to make, let's say, five queries to my database, right? I'm building something complicated. Maybe I want to have a page that views all of the bookings for a hotel system or something, right. That are available during a certain weekend. And then I also want to cross-reference that with a whole bunch of other stuff. I might make five queries. And so in that case, if your user is, let's say in Lisbon and your database is in the US, you have to make five long round trips. And so the idea of the super cloud is that it's not about whether the code is running near the user or near the data or where the data itself even is. And I'll talk in a second about that component of it as well. But it's about not having to think about it, any of it. And the super cloud provider in this case, Cloudflare can handle all of that on your behalf. And we have a very advantageous point of doing that right, because there is so much traffic that flows through our network that we're able to make a lot of these decisions intelligently. And because we have this network, we have the capacity to be able to schedule in locations, even if they're not, you know, one of the kind of like big central cloud locations. So I think it's really interesting. I think it opens up a lot of really cool use cases that cloud wasn't super well suitable for or would have required a lot of work. And I think ultimately it's about developer giving developer superpowers, right? Because if you don't have to worry about all of the stuff that you get all this time back and you can focus on stuff that actually brings value to users. And as a developer personally, previously I think is a lot more fun. Yes. There's so much toil and thinking that has to go into like, well, where do I put this? Where is my backup? Is this really the best place for it? This whole concept of like an earth, like, why does it matter what region it runs in? Like it should be the same everywhere and love that concept of being able to intelligently determine where the best place to run it is. Because as a human, like I may think I know the best place, but it may not be the best place. Or maybe it's the best place today, but it won't be the best place a year from now or three months from now, whatever that case may be. So being able to shift that load automatically. And there have been so many, as you said, there are things that you might not know today about what your business might look like tomorrow, Right. So if you suddenly acquire a whole bunch of customers and I don't know, let's say Brazil, that's really great. You're for your business, you're growing internationally, but spinning up a whole new data center, even in the cloud. Having talked to teams that have done it, it's a minimum order, long effort, if not more. Replicating everything all over again, it turns out, is really, really hard. And making sure you get that right is really tricky. And one other thing that I think is pretty interesting is even in situations where you actually want to be more granular. So a great example of that is for regulatory compliance reasons, if your data or your compute needs to be local, it's always easier to scope things down than it is to blow things up. Right. And again, kind of having this really granular network gives you a lot a lot more granular access as well. Like you can restrict things by GDPR, by region, you can restrict things by country. I think that would be really hard to architect in a traditional cloud environment. And speaking of cloud environments and you talked a little bit about storage as well, I think a lot of people have thought, well, I'll just do multi cloud and that'll help me solve these things because I can deal with like the GDPR. I can have this region use this provider. But that's a little bit more complicated, especially when you're looking at things like storage. So another one of our themes this week is storage. So how is that kind of all play in together? Yeah. So we first of all, being realistic, there are great offerings out there today and we do want to support cloud use cases and we play really well with other cloud providers. But and I think that comes into play specifically with data as well. So I think that there's two components here. One is we're seeing more and more developers that are building their whole entire application beginning to end super tenants entirely on Cloudflare. And so when you do that, what we're able to do is we have control over the whole thing. And you can tell us, you know, the data needs to stay in the. You for. Compliance reasons, but we can still control where the data gets stored. And so that's kind of what you get with durable objects where you store objects on us and then we're able to move those around based on where it makes sense for them to be. And so that was some of the original premise where, you know, when you originally create an account, maybe you might be traveling to, I don't know. Italy is a great place to vacation, so maybe you'll create your account for a travel site there. But then you go back to the US and you're booking from there and we don't want your object to stay there, right? We want it to be able to travel to the right place for it to be. So that's the case when we control the data. But there are situations where we don't control the data, especially if you already have it somewhere. And moving data is obviously going to be really hard. And not only that, but yeah, many reasons why you have your data in a database. And in those cases what we can do is we can move the compute closer to your data regardless of what cloud it's running on or even if you're using a managed service, we can figure out where we end up connecting to and still be able to intelligently route the compute. So I think the really interesting thing with the data is whether it's on, if it's on us, we can move the data around and if it's not, then we can move the compute around close to the data. And as more people are starting to build now, starting to we've been around for five years with our developer platform, but as more people are building on us, as you're saying, they're building their full applications on there, one critical piece of that is observability and insight into what those applications are doing. This whole notion of moving compute and data around is based on observability, is looking at the metrics to determine like where is the best place, is latency faster here versus there? So what are some of the things that we're exploring and thinking about from that observability and analytics perspective? So we have some observability announcements that I'll give maybe a little bit of a spoiler, but not too much that will be coming towards the end of the week with regards to new tooling that will be giving developers to give better observability on our platform today, there is already so much that we offer, whether you're using Wrangler tail or Logpush or in dashboard logs and specifically with yeah, being able to move the data around. I mean, obviously there's a lot of data that we get access to in terms of just every request that flows through us and being able to measure things like how long each request takes, right. All right. So stay tuned for more announcements coming this week on Observability. You've also touched on earlier a little bit about the developer experience. I think a lot of what we're talking about this week is that developer experience. So I'm going to start with. A foundational question of how do you define developer experience? I think that's one of those words that people have different definitions of. So how do you define developer experience? That's such a great question and there are so many different ways to answer it. I think at the end of the day, it's not quite the same thing, but it's almost synonymous with developer productivity, right? It's I think about making helping developers go faster. And that can happen a whole bunch of different ways, right? So you see generally developer experience manifested kind of across so many different points of interaction, whether it's your first time learning about a product and you're checking out the docs and trying to figure out how it works. If the documentation is clear, that's a part of the developer experience. If you are then diving into the product and getting started, your experience signing up, your experience downloading the tooling, all of those things, having as little friction as possible in them, that's all developer experience. As you're building the application itself and you're writing lines of code and you're getting errors. Whether or not those errors are helpful, that's a part of developer experience and obviously all the way to I'm now ready to put something into production and hitting that merge button can be really, really terrifying. And so I think a part of making that experience good is taking some of the horror away from that experience and giving developers, first of all, the tooling to be able to do it in a way that they're comfortable with what they're shipping, right? So that's where things like in pages, for example, we have previews that make it really easy to be able to poke around and understand before you put something into production, like, okay, this is how it's going to behave. I think giving developers the tooling to roll back because we all make mistakes. Things are going to go wrong. You should plan for that. And then obviously it kind of goes back to what we're just talking about, observability, which is, you know, giving people the confidence of, okay, if something goes wrong, I'll be able to understand where it's going wrong or I'll be able to see it, I'll be notified. So I think it's not any one particular thing, but it's about making developers feel both comfortable at every step of the way and then also making them productive. And in many cases, it's also not just about the things you give them, but also getting out of their way, Right. And not I think that's where a lot of things like, you know, if we're better suited to make a decision, then we should just do it rather than making you think about things like regions or how much memory you're going to need. All of that. We also love to give developers the ability to override that because there's always going to be edge cases where you might need something different than the default configuration. But I think all of those things kind of add up to making developers go as quickly as possible. And for people that are kind of new to Cloudflare and our innovation weeks. So we talk about developer week this week. This is a part of our series of Innovation Weeks where we kind of like to bombard people with announcements and information. But part of the reason we do these innovation weeks is to get that early feedback from developers, and that early feedback helps us build this really strong and powerful developer experience. So when we sit there in the blogs and say, Join us on Discord, share your information. Like, let us know what's working, what's not working. We truly mean that we want you to give this information to us and help us make this better. We can think we know like what's the best developer experience, but it's really those of you that are out there, like with their hands and keyboards building in this every single day that can provide that clarity and feedback. Be like, hey, this isn't clear. Oh, okay, we can, we can fix that. We can make this clearer for you. So just a quick little interlude on what we talk about, what we mean when we talk about our innovation. No, I completely agree with that. And I think a lot of people would be surprised by we have so many of our PMS and engineers that are super active in the community. I'll often see something go from a bug or not. Even. A bug, but maybe a snag and experience getting reported to getting fixed sometimes same day. Obviously some things are going to take longer, but we're definitely in there and listening and it's always fascinating from a product standpoint to kind of. When you start planning a product, think about all of the things that developers are going to need. And we do try to put things in developers hands early and iterate as quickly as possible. And there's always something that you think is going to be a big deal that it turns out no one cares about. And then there's one thing that you didn't even think about that everyone cares about from day one, and you're like, All right, that's our new priority and we're going to go fix that. So, yes, definitely encourage everyone to join all of the channels and give us all of the feedback. I promise we listen very attentively. So one of the unique but one of the things we're doing this week for Developer Week is in addition, kind of all of our product announcements and internal announcements, we have a very large number of customer partner and internal posts on what is being built, like what we've built, what our customers are building or like new and fun integrations that you can work with because it's those examples that really can shine a light and maybe spark an idea that we're like, Wait a minute, like I now have an idea based on this and I'm going to go and take it off in another direction. So we have like a huge number of customer and internal, like we're calling them like technical deep dives or how tos on things and keep an eye out for those. And I don't know if there's any kind of sneak peak you want to offer on one you're really excited to hear about. Yeah, I'm that's one of the things that I'm the most excited about. I'm sure you get this all the time too, but I think the number one question I get asked is This sounds really cool, but what can I actually build with it? And you can say anything, and that's certainly what we believe. But it can also be a little disorienting. You know, it's like walking to the grocery store and there's like a million choices and you're like, What am I making for dinner? So the examples and the blog posts and the guest speakers definitely are intended to, I think, help crystallize in people's heads. Like, okay, these are a few examples that are really, really tangible for me. I'm trying to think what a fun sneak peak would be. I know that. So one thing that we're very proud of at Cloudflare is we dogfood quite a bit and we build very, very extensively on the Workers platform. And that's actually one of the things that enables us to have these innovation weeks and enables us to ship so quickly. And so there will be quite a few products that will be talking about how we built them that I'm yeah, I'm really excited about. I think we're going to open source a couple of things as well. So those are the things that I look forward to. And if I'm thinking of going back through all of our posts, we've got about 38 posts going out this week and I know we've got ones talking about what people built using R2 and Durable Objects and Workers, KV, and Pages, and D1 is in there. D1 in there, I don't know that we have stuff on Queues but Queues was just announced in private beta six weeks ago so I think that's okay that we do know that every single product is represented in some way and. I'm like, I'll take it as a challenge. I'm throwing down next time. If you're building something in Queues, I want to see a blog post from you. I wouldn't be surprised, Queues itself is quite heavily built on Workers as I was just talking to one of the engineering directors that works on it the other week and he was talking about how honestly Queues wouldn't have been able to be built especially so quickly without Workers. So Queues was announced and that's kind of the meta message for the day as well. Shameless plug here, I'm going straight from this the next session after this one is with the engineering manager for Queues as well as the winter updates. So if you want to know more about Queues, you have to join or stay on for the next session and ask us questions. I'm sure Rob is more than prepared to take them on. We'll be excited to hear them. Yeah, I've already pulled some questions that people were asking on Twitter this morning for Rob. He doesn't know that yet. So yes, please ask questions. Ask talk to us on Twitter. We really do love hearing from all of you. One other thing. I want to make sure that we have a chance to talk about. It was in the super cloud announcement a little bit buried in there. But it really interesting stat that 10 million requests per second being processed by workers scripts and it was in my head trying to think about. For someone that's not in tech that like to share, like what is something of that scale? Like I was just like, couldn't come up with anything. So like for somebody that's not building websites and understands how many 10 million requests per second is, is there a good analogy or be like, this is more traffic than all of these sites combined on a regular basis. That's a great question. I wonder if so, I don't have an answer to it off the top of my head, but I feel like the radar site might be able to answer this. Which, by the way, is also built on Workers. And I might plug in a small spoiler alert. That is one of the things that we'll be talking about, how we rebuilt it on pages and the remix framework. So I'm very excited for that blog post. But yeah, I feel like there must be something in there and there must be a real life kind of analogies as well, right? Like the number of. It's time. Do like YouTube videos, like I'm trying to think of like the stats I've heard about, like how many people are uploading and things like that, like looking for those types of metrics, Like, I love like weird random facts like that. But if you think about it and I know I'm putting you on the spot here, but on that second Workers has been around for four years now, five, the growth has been kind of exponential. I think the last time we reported this, it wasn't, you know. A small it was there's a big delta between the last number in this number. Oh yeah. When we just wrapped up our final Cloudflare Connect, which is our Cloudflare conference that we have in a few different cities, and we just wrapped up our final one in San Francisco a month or so ago. And when I was in Sydney, Matthew was doing his keynote that has that stat on it. A number of requests per second that work has handles and that number to me I was like, Oh, this is already out of date. And it seemed astronomical at the time. I think it was like 6 million requests per second. So that was the stat when we started doing the Connects, which the first one was in New York and I think was in June. Does that sound right? Something right? Yeah. So from June to now, we've almost doubled. And that's one of the really powerful things of being able to build on this network is I'm not going to say that scaling doesn't require any work on our behalf, but it's just crazy how powerful this platform is. And every day we onboard new customers with massive volumes of traffic or new applications take off and start taking on a lot of traffic and just know that the platform is going to scale with you. Yeah, and I'll say also, like I think six weeks ago we started kind of throwing around the stats for that post and I think six weeks ago like, oh, like we've hit peaks of 9 million, so we've gone from like 9 million to 10 million in like six weeks. So, yes, huge. Thank you to everybody that's, you know, building and part of that 10 million number. Let's see where that is next year when we take a look at it or six months from now. So we need to start wrapping things up. Brita, is there anything else you want to share with the community about developer Week? Well, I mean, I think the most fun part of it for me and I feel like the expectation with the Innovation Weeks is that I mean, I get very excited to blow people's minds, obviously, with the announcements that we have coming. But the reality is that by the end of the week, our minds are always blown by the things that people build on us. And so, yeah, what makes these things really fun for us is people sharing what they're building with us. So I would encourage anyone to do so, whether it's on Twitter or on Discord. We have the what I built channel that I check religiously, and it's always exciting to see what people come up with. Just this morning I was looking and someone was talking about connecting my SQL instance. They were running to workers using Cloudflare tunnels and the entire rest of the suite. So I would encourage folks to join the community. What else? We'll be doing these Cloudflare TV Sessions. It's a really great way to get, I think, behind the scenes look, that's a bit harder to convey in blog posts. And I know actually one other thing that I'll plug is that we're hiring for quite a few positions on workers and Cloudflare in general. And so if all of this stuff is interesting to you and you like building things at a massive scale, do check out our careers page and come talk to us. Yeah, I'll echo kind of what is that like? We have what launch today segments every day this week. The next one is coming up right after this. so stay tuned. I will be back with Rob and James to talk about some of their announcements. And then we have a couple of like technical how to demo sessions this week as well. So stay tuned for those. Rita, thank you very much for the time. It's always fun talking with you and we'll see what people build. Thank you, Dawn. Looking forward to it as well. Bye. Mindbody specifically focused on the health and wellness space and was built by people who were passionate about health and wellness. We serve health and wellness businesses all over the world. We allow our customers to spend more time focusing on the parts of their business that they love and less time worrying about scheduling, software and payroll and other day to day administrative work. We want to protect customers from attacks that could hurt their business and their brand. At Mindbody, we're passionate about ensuring that our customers data is secure. When we first approached Cloudflare, we had a lot of different tools in our security stack and there was a lot of management overhead associated with all that kind of complexity. I think at one point we had four different WAFs, a separate tool for bot management and two kinds, and we basically managed to consolidate all of that. Into using just Cloudflare without losing any of the functionality or any of the protections that we had in place. It was the kind of tool I could hand to junior analysts or senior engineers, and they would all know how to manage it pretty quickly. With our old environment, we were constantly fighting botnets and attempts to scrape our inventory Credential stuffing attacks. When we moved Cloudflare, we were able to mitigate a lot of these kinds of attacks much easier and more consistently. Using Cloudflare Management, we see a lot fewer false positives with actual valid end users using our application and being flagged as a bot. We've gone from dealing with several per day to only a few per week. With the Cloudflare access solution, we are able to provide Zero Trust access to sensitive internal applications to contractors and third party vendors. It puts our internal applications behind strong authentication protocols and allows us to ensure that only authorized users are able to even see the service. The health and wellness industry is only going to grow. I think mindbody is going to be part of that rising tide that floats all boats. Cloudflare will help us scale and grow and secure all those services as the industry expands.