Developer Week 2024 edition. AI, GA, and deep dives

Hello everyone and welcome to This Week in Net. It's the April the 8th, 2024 and this week it's a special edition to talk about one of our Innovation Weeks, Developer Week.

There's no lack of AI but also announcements of all sorts and blog posts. I'm your host João Tomé, based in Lisbon, Portugal and with me I have Rita Kozlov and Phillip Jones, our product wheezers that led our Developer Week.

Hello, how are you?

Doing well. Good, how are you? First, let's start with Rita. Where are you based?

I'm based in New York. And you Phillip? I'm based in San Francisco. So we got most of the time zones, a lot of time zones covered here.

That's true. And the solar ellipse is almost on now that we're recording this.

So that's there too in play.

So we had our Developer Week last week, a full week of announcements. First, why don't we start on why do we do this, these types of Innovation Weeks specifically?

I'll take this one. So, you know, one of the things that Cloudflare is known for is we love to ship, we love to iterate, we love to put tools in developers hands.

And so Innovation Weeks allow us to, you know, take a lot of products, product announcements, features that we've been working towards and announce them over the course of a week in a way that really draws the attention of folks.

And the goal is really to get people excited about what we're building and start using it.

Sure. What is the main difference between, for example, this one where we had a lot of general available products compared with the previous year, the Developer Week of 2023?

I would say that the announcements change and some of the themes change based on, you know, we're trying to always listen to feedback from customers.

But other than that, you know, we do try to be consistent in some ways in terms of just kind of the general formula that we follow.

Or, you know, we like to have a mix of, you know, customer stories, announcements, other things.

We did try a slightly different format this year.

I don't know if you want to talk more about that.

Yeah, I could talk about the kind of, you know, a little bit of different format than in the past.

I think, you know, in past years, a lot of the announcements we've done, we've sort of had different sort of blog posts and activities for each of the individual kind of product announcements.

This year, one of the, you know, kind of small but I think meaningful changes that we made is bundling a lot of the product announcements into, you know, kind of more sort of dense announcements.

So, you know, rather than having kind of like, you know, many, many announcements for people to kind of follow and keep track of, we tried to keep it more condensed into, you know, different kind of, what different types of users might be interested in.

So, you know, for example, R2, as opposed to having like, you know, five blog posts, we had like, you know, kind of a big update on R2.

So that way, everyone who's interested in R2 or interested in, you know, other products, for example, they can kind of just quickly, at a glance, see what's changed.

Yeah, and then one of the other things we did is just kind of really elevate some of the technical deep dives that, you know, our developer audience, you know, really resonates with them.

So a couple of like small changes to the format, but overall, like Rita said, same thing.

It's all about developers sharing their stories and some of the great things that we've been building over the last few months.

So exciting. Well, I was curious in terms of feedback, actually, regarding the technical blog posts, a lot of great feedback on those blog posts that are more deep dive, explain developers, how can they do specific things?

There's code there.

There's a lot to explore in some of those technical deep dives, right? Yeah, I think the interesting thing about the deep dives is, I mean, we always have documentation that tells you how you can use something.

Or, you know, once you're getting to once you're ready to start using it yourself, you know, we'll have tutorials and things like that.

But the purpose of the deep dives this time around was actually to give developers a peek behind the curtain and give folks an understanding of how it all works under the hood.

I think especially as engineers, we like to understand the inner workings of something.

And that's really, I think, a really core way of building trust, right?

If something is a completely black box, you know, you can tell me about all of the benefits.

You can tell me about the ways in which it works better than other things out there.

But the thing that's really going to make me trust it is understanding how it works.

And so, you know, some of the really good deep dives were on things like D1, fine tuning, how we supported Python.

And yeah, I mean, yeah, part of it is the trust. And the other part of it is I think it's really fun to explore, you know, some of those details.

And I know that I learned a lot, right? Generally, we're more on the product side.

And while we do inquire about, you know, specs and details, you're sometimes left out of the really gnarly engineering problems.

And so, I think that those are just particularly fun to read.

And like I said, yeah, you can learn a lot.

Absolutely. We announced last week the fact that we reached 2 million developers that are building on Cloudflare.

So that's like a big number. And in some cases, there's people that don't know that Cloudflare has this amazing and huge developer platform.

But there's a lot that's being built. So a lot of developers there.

That's a big number. What is the feedback regarding also that number?

Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, it's a big number. We're really excited about it. You know, I feel like every time we do these developer weeks, you know, we're delighted by more and more folks who are building on the platform.

I think, you know, to me personally, 2 million is a big number.

And, you know, all these numbers are great.

But it's about the individual sort of stories of the folks behind the big number, right?

So, you know, Rita and I and the rest of the team, we're fortunate enough to talk to many, probably not all 2 million, but many of the 2 million folks.

And I think that's the most exciting thing about it.

That's, you know, what makes, you know, to me, what's exciting to, you know, I'm excited to kind of work and like wake up every morning and do that.

So 2 million is a big number. What's even more important is that we're enabling developers to build successful applications.

And it's really fun to connect with them. And I'll add, in addition to the 2 million developers, as Philip said, right, like that's a cool number that feels really good, but that's so quantitative.

And so in terms of interesting qualitative things that we shared too, as a part of this week, we announced the new batch of Launchpad customers and companies.

And it's so cool to see actually some of the companies that, you know, I've started following and startups that, you know, I really, really admire.

And Cloudflare is becoming their stack or platform of choice.

Similarly, you know, Philip's blog post that went out today that summarizes everything that we announced this week has quotes from some really, really great customers similarly about why they chose Cloudflare or, you know, like how much Sunflare has made their life.

And I think that those like quotes and customer stories really make that 2 million number come to life.

Exactly.

You mentioned the wrap-up blog. Here it is. That was published today. And it has all of the details of all of the announcements by week specifically.

So actually, why not start here in terms of the announcements?

Because it's divided by day of the week.

So let's start talking about the announcements specifically using the blog post itself.

Although those who want also can explore our developer week hub on Cloudflare.com that also has all the announcements.

But for example, let's start with Monday, which was more focused on D1.

What was this day all about? And what is this D1 perspective?

And that went GA. Yeah. So, you know, yeah, we had several exciting announcements on Monday.

One of them, one of the big ones that you mentioned is D1 GA.

That was really exciting. We've been working, you know, and partnering with, you know, companies throughout, you know, throughout the beta period.

And we're excited to announce that, you know, it's ready for general availability to be released.

And, you know, it's not just the, you know, kind of announcement of, oh, this is a GA product.

There's also a lot of improvements that went along with it.

For example, increasing the, you know, max database size to 10 gigabytes was a big announcement.

Also increasing the number of total databases that our users can go ahead and build.

And that's a big deal because, you know, we're seeing sort of a trend of, I see this even with R2, which is a product I work on.

A lot of folks want to do this architecture of like a database per customer or a R2 bucket per customer.

And so raising those limits and, you know, it's a big deal.

Also, we talked a little bit about the, you know, kind of the ongoing plans to do read replication with D1.

And that's really exciting, too, because it's all about making, you know, you know, it's all about this sort of like global data, you know, kind of theme here where even if your data is located in one place, we want to make sure it's fast around the world.

Hyperdrive was also a really exciting announcement that that went GA.

And then, yeah, you can kind of click over it here, but that was exciting as well.

And that's, you know, we have D1, which is our serverless database offering.

Hyperdrive is for all the folks that we know who already have existing, say, Postgres databases out there.

And this is our product that makes that feel global with things like caching and things like that.

So that was exciting as well. And you can see right there as you're scrolling, I think maybe the most exciting part of this announcement is that, you know, look at the pricing there, right?

It's $0 per query, $0 for connection pooling for our workers paid customers.

So I think that's probably the most exciting part of the announcement.

And then, yeah, I mean, just kind of going down the line here, queues is amazing.

This announcement, I think the big thing was to have HTTP pull consumers because, you know, initially before this, the way that you'd consume these queues is having a worker, a consumer worker that would pick up messages that are written into the queues.

And that's how we, you know, I imagine that most folks are going to use it, but some people also have consumers that they want to have outside of Cloudflare, maybe running in your existing infrastructure.

Otherwise, an HTTP pull consumers allows you to kind of like pull the queues externally.

So that was a big announcement. So, yeah, a lot of announcements in here.

Probably don't want to go through all of them, but really exciting.

A bunch of them, a bunch of them. Also, Deep Dive, we were mentioning Deep Dive.

This is why workers environment variables contain live objects. But on Tuesday, Tuesday was one of the main days in terms of announcements, right?

Because it was all about AI and workers AI that is now generally available with new capabilities, right?

That's right. Yeah, so Tuesday was definitely a big day, especially for AI.

So workers AI went GA. We had a few updates on vectorized and AI gateway or other AI products.

As a part of the workers AI GA, workers AI is now running in over 150 data centers, which is by far the most global AI offering you can use, especially without having to manually configure anything.

We had some fun updates, like we have a new AI playground.

We updated the dashboard. And one of the things that I was really excited about was the Hugging Face announcement or partnership went live, which means that you can now deploy workers AI from Hugging Face for supported models as easily as with a couple of clicks.

And as you can see, yeah, so we support now fine tuned models on workers AI, which is completely new with Loras.

And this is actually a really great deep dive. Loras are a fairly new concept.

And there's different ways of running fine tunes. And that's a really, really efficient way to do it.

And so we kind of dive into, you know, how it all works.

You mentioned the fact that 150 cities with AI inference GPUs, in a sense. For those who are building AI tools, what difference does this make?

Why is this really relevant for them?

Like I said, I think it makes us, you know, the most global AI network out there.

And what it really means is that you can run your inference much, much closer to the user.

Right. So less latency and a lot of, you know, optimizations around cost efficiency and, you know, importantly, ease of use in terms of just getting your model up and running because it is so serverless.

True. And you were mentioning the Hug and Face partnership.

Hug and Face is one of the experts in models, open models in a sense.

So it puts our platform with a more larger scope in a sense.

Right. Exactly. Where should we go next? Go to Wednesday or still talk a bit more about Tuesday?

We can talk about Wednesday. Wednesday is a day that's very, you know, very close to my heart because I work on R2.

And, yeah, it was a really exciting day.

I mean, you know, we had several really exciting R2 specific announcements.

And then, you know, also some kind of announcements talking about the broader, you know, some of the new products that we're building on the Cloudflare data platform.

So just to talk about some of the R2 announcements, one of the really exciting ones was event notifications.

And this essentially gives developers the ability, you know, because, you know, R2 is an object storage product.

And what we know from talking to customers and just generally is that applications don't stop once data is uploaded.

Right. Oftentimes, if you're someone who if you're maybe you have users who are uploading video or audio, it's not done when they when audio, you know, upload is completed.

Right. Now, you need you maybe need to transcode audio or process the video files, et cetera.

You know, and it's not, you know, and, you know, if you're if you're using R2 as a data lake or storing event data, you know, the job is not done when the event data gets there.

Maybe now you need to load it into your data warehouse, et cetera.

So that's that's really exciting.

We've already had some great adoption there, even in the last few days.

So that's super exciting to hear from folks. And then some of the other R2 announcements that we had were Google Cloud support for our data migration tool, SuperSlurper.

That's a really exciting one. Over the last few months, we've had thousands of developers migrate over a petabyte of data from AWS with SuperSlurper.

And we wanted to go ahead and expand the the offering and allow folks, you know, who are customers of Google Cloud Storage to go ahead and migrate data if they want to as well.

So that was really exciting. Also, in addition to that, notifications are already seeing people use that.

And that's I think that's the most exciting thing about these weeks is a lot of the stuff we're announcing, most of it's available for people to try.

And, you know, people kind of take up to it quite quickly and are already providing us feedback.

So really exciting.

And then infrequent access, probably the third thing. We have a new tier that's meant for some of the longer tail access pattern use cases that essentially allows people to optimize their costs.

So that's exciting, too. So now let's move to Thursday.

This is the day where we announce Pages as support for Monorepos, Wrangler, Toml, database integrations and more.

I can take this one and maybe cover all of Thursday, just keeping an eye on the time.

So a lot of the long awaited features for Pages landed on Thursday.

So support for Monorepos is a big one.

So the ability to deploy, you know, several different projects that come from the same repo if you want them to come from different subdirectories.

Support for Wrangler.Toml I'm really excited about because it's going to make it that much easier to spin up example projects off of repositories.

And overall, we talk about, you know, we announced last year the kind of we want workers in Pages to eventually become the same product.

And so we dive into that. Thursday was also a really big day for taking applications to production.

So one big announcement was gradual deployments, which allows customers to deploy their worker, you know, by increments over time, as opposed to going live everywhere.

That's a really huge improvement.

We announced a new rate limiting API that I think is really, really cool.

And we've seen products emerging around that is actually one of the earliest primitives that customers have been asking us for that's now directly available in the worker.

And then we also announced new Cloudflare SDK.

So they're going to be landing over time. But the first TypeScript SDK is actually now available for folks to start using.

And then, you know, we also have our media suite, which includes stream Cloudflare calls and Cloudflare images.

So anything that you want to do with video or images, we want to be able to support.

I think the calls open beta is really exciting. So you can build WebRTC applications really easily now.

And there are a few other really cool features that were announced for images and stream as well.

It was a good day, too, with this media, Cloudflare media part with calls and stream and images following through.

And next we have Friday, a great day also. And this was the day where we announced a few companies that Cloudflare acquired, Baseline and PartyKit, right?

That's right. Yes. So PartyKit is actually it's really cool. It allows customers to build multiplayer applications on top of durable objects.

And it's actually a Cloudflare employee that went and started his own thing.

And so it's exciting.

Sunil is back, right? Sunil. That's right. And, yeah, you know, observability, I think, is a huge area of improvement for our platform and something that we want to create a really great experience out of.

And so we saw the folks, Baseline, really leading the way there.

And what they built in such short time is really incredible.

So really excited to have them join us as a part of the team and build a lot of the future of observability for serverless applications here at Cloudflare.

And browser rendering API was also put in generally available mode, in a sense.

Yes. Browser rendering API went GA. Orifice platforms is now available to customers beyond enterprise, which is really exciting.

We're rolling out Cloudflare snippets to more customers.

Stale Wallet Validate is a long-awaited feature that's, you know, the asynchronous revalidation of it has been long-awaited.

So we allow customers to start signing up for that.

And then, yeah, we added JavaScript native RPC to workers, which is very much a simplified way of calling between workers and other services.

The JavaScript community was really excited about that one.

And one other thing that we're constantly improving is our support for frameworks out there.

And we did some really clever and interesting work in order to support local development for many of these frameworks, including going and updating VEED, which is the underlying engine for many of them.

So that's one of the things that we announced on Friday as well.

Big day to wrap up, honestly. A really, really, what felt like a really great and really big week.

It was. And the feedback was amazing in terms of social media, developers.

Were you surprised that you both on the feedback that we got in some way?

Who wants to start? Philip? Yeah, I think what I already kind of mentioned is just talking from my perspective, some of the things that we launched on some of the R2 side of things.

I think the strongest form of feedback is folks who are willing to take the leap and try things out and start building, you know, even within days of some of these cool new announcements and functionality that's coming out.

So I think for me, not really a surprising thing, but it's always just cool to see people go out there, start experimenting, start building, start reaching out, having questions and feedback so early.

So to me, that's one of the more exciting things. Because feedback is also good to iterate, right?

Rita, any final thoughts there? No, the feedback has been really amazing.

As Philip said, it's cool to see people playing with things that you're putting out there the very day that that happens.

I think that, you know, anything that anyone says that action, you know, actions speak louder than words.

So, yeah.

And, you know, people aren't always going to have time to play around the day of.

So I'm very excited to see kind of what all comes over the next few weeks and months.

It was a great week. Thank you both for your work. And thank you to everyone that participated inside Cloudflare in this amazing week.

Yes, thank you to everyone who made this possible.

And thanks for having us, John. And that's a wrap.

Thank you. Hi, I'm Dawn.

I'm the Director of Developer Marketing here at Cloudflare, based in Iowa.

I'm here today to share some of the social highlights related to our recent Developer Week and want to share with you some of what we saw on the web.

It was quite a week with Developer Week. There were loads of announcements from general availability of products, technical deep dives, a couple of acquisitions, and sneak peeks into what's coming next.

Our announcements often make people look back at our prior Innovation Weeks.

They're always amazed at how much we roll out and announce during these weeks.

Somebody asked, is there a secret lab where they're kept, caffeinated, and coding nonstop?

Yes. Yes, there is. And sometimes it makes people pause and rethink everything they're doing, hopefully in a bit of a good way.

And it's not just our customers and community members who take to social to share.

It's great when our engineers share their excitement about what they've built.

Sid's an engineer on our Emerging Technology and Incubation team.

He was working on workflows. His tweet thread prompted a ton of discussion.

It was great to see. One of our most popular announcements that got lots and lots of love during the week was Python Workers.

Tons and tons of excitement for this new announcement. Dinesh, you can sign up for a free account and start building today.

Earlier in the week, Wes and Chan were sharing frustrations on drop-off video frames and poor quality.

This is exactly what our announcement of calls can help with. We share a lot of information and details in our blogs.

Sometimes you just need the TLDR.

Although we try and keep things quiet, sometimes there are spoilers, both from inside the company and out.

But that's okay.

We like it. It shows the excitement that people have about what we're doing.

And I'm very glad to see when people were right about what we were announcing.

Oftentimes, a simple thank you for what's been released or what's being done can go a long way.

So with that, I would like to thank all of you that shared your excitement about Developer Week.

For everybody that worked on Developer Week. If you've missed any of the announcements, you can check them out on the Developer Week Hub.

Thank you. Until next time.