Cloudflare creates Workers Unbound platform for serverless development

Cloudflare has brought a new serverless platform for developers to market, aiming to help developers run 'complicated' computing workloads across Cloudflare's network.

Cloudflare Workers Unbound is an extension of the Cloudflare Workers edge computing platform, which has been on the market since 2017. According to Cloudflare, more than 20,000 developers created applications on Cloudflare Worker platform in the last quarter.

Cloudflare Worker Unbound adds additional use cases to the platform, with support for flexibility and cost reductions than centralised serverless platforms.

Cloudflare will continue to offer the original Cloudflare Workers model, now known as Cloudflare Workers Bundled. Cloudflare Workers Unbound now allows developers using the Cloudflare Workers platform to create more complex applications.

Discord director of infrastructure Mark Smith says the Cloudflare platform is part of providing its user experience.

"We use Workers extensively for core application delivery, download authentication, spam and abuse mitigation, and more. Our engineers now reach for Workers first to solve many kinds of challenges."

"Serverless promises both a radical new economic model for compute, and a radically simplified programming model, with the developer focusing on orchestration and composition of rich back end services. Autoscaling, performance, observability, built-in security and support for a range of modern programming languages are all provided by the infrastructure," Redmonk cofounder and analyst James Governor.

• Developers can run heavy workloads without having to worry about overly restrictive CPU constraints and pay only for what they use. 
• Cloudflare Workers Unbound is a platform that offers out of the box support for 0 nanosecond cold start times, compared with cold starts on other platforms that can take seconds and add unpredictable variability. 
• Cloudflare Workers isolates architecture lets Cloudflare run CPUs unthrottled.
• Workloads run across the Cloudflare network, spanning more than 200 cities in more than 100 countries, reducing average network latency for users everywhere in the world. 
• Developers can update their code and have it live globally in 15 seconds, compared with the minutes it can take to update on other serverless platforms. 
• Developers can write code in the languages they know and love, including JavaScript, C, C++, Python, Go, Rust, Scala, Kotlin, and even COBOL. 
• Cloudflare Workers Unbound automatically scales to meet demand without developers needing to worry about spinning up new instances. 
• Developers can achieve productivity with new tools to simplify debugging and diagnosing problems. 
• The platform is built to withstand the latest security threats, including sophisticated timing attacks, and was reviewed by the team that discovered the Spectre class of vulnerabilities.