flâneur

Cloud Computing without Containers

blog.cloudflare.com · 1,800 words · saved by 1 readers

Cloudflare has a cloud computing platform called Workers. Unlike essentially every other cloud computing platform I know of, it doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. We believe that is the future of Serverless and cloud computing in general, and I’ll try to convince you why. Two years ago we had a problem. We were limited in how many features and options we could build in-house, we needed a way for customers to be able to build for themselves. We set out to find a way to let people write code on our servers deployed around the world (we had a little over a hundred data centers then, 155 as of this writing). Our system needed to run untrusted code securely, with low overhead. We sit in front of ten million sites and process millions and millions of requests per second, it also had to run very very quickly. The Lua we had used previously didn’t run in a sandbox; customers couldn’t write their own code without our supervision. Traditional virtualization and container technologies li

Cloudflare has a cloud computing platform called Workers . Unlike essentially every other cloud computing platform I know of, it doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. We believe that is the future of Serverless and cloud computing in general, and I’ll try to convince you why. Isolates Two years ago we had a problem. We were limited in how many features and options we could build in-house, we needed a way for customers to be able to build for themselves. We set out to find a way to let people write code on our servers deployed around the world (we had a little over a hundred data centers

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