Edge Rendering represents the new state-of-the-art in frontend hosting: rather than hosting your code in just a single location, host it globally in dozens or hundreds of locations to be as close as possible to your users. And unlike a CDN, an edge rendering network has the power to serve static and dynamic content just as easily, a perfect match for FABs, the technology underpinning Linc.
It’s still a new field, but one product has emerged as the best in the world: Cloudflare Workers.
What are Workers?
Cloudflare Workers run on the Cloudflare global cloud network that spans over 200 cities in more than 100 countries.
Cloudflare launched their Serverless hosting offering in 2017 with a key difference: hundreds of global locations and a JavaScript-native execution environment. Workers is a service that provides a lightweight JavaScript execution environment to augment existing applications or create new ones.
With Cloudflare’s offering, you only pay for what you use. Hosting static files on cloud can cost you just a few cents a month, so you can get set up without prohibitive costs.
Architecture
Cloudflare Workers have gone against the grain, and instead of offering cloud computing based on containers and virtual machines, Workers use “Isolates”, the technology that allows V8 (Google Chrome’s JavaScript engine) to run thousands of processes on a single server in an efficient and secure manner. Compared to virtual machines, Isolates greatly reduce the overhead required to execute user code, which means faster execution and lower use of memory.
This advanced approach is 100% compatible with FABs.
Performance
Not only do you get the benefit of moving workloads to within a few milliseconds of your users, the V8 isolate-based infrastructure also performs significantly better than competing serverless offerings. The Cloudflare team ran tests to compare Cloudflare Workers against AWS Lambda and Lambda@Edge, and came to the conclusion that Workers is 441% faster than a Lambda function, and 192% faster than Lambda@Edge.
Price
A Worker offering 50 milliseconds of CPU costs $0.50 per million requests, the equivalent Lambda costs $1.81 per million. Therefore, Workers end up being about 3X cheaper.
Setup
“Building and hosting a nextjs site on Cloudflare Workers via Linc was a great experience! My only critique is that switching between tabs to get my Cloudflare api token setup correctly was a little tedious”
-- @Flam
All of Linc's features are supported regardless of your chosen host, but setting up with Workers just takes a few minutes and offers superior performance at a low cost.
For detailed information for more information on how to get set up, head over to our docs.
