Amazon Web Services is a hulking mess of a cloud computing platform. It offers hundreds of distinct products and services, many of which overlap, with pricing schemes that almost seem designed to confuse. Enterprises love AWS, but then again, they also have armies of IT staff to figure it all out.
There's a big market for cloud computing simplicity. Platforms like DigitalOcean, Akamai's Linode, Vultr, Netlify, Vercel, and many others aim to make life as simple as possible for developers. In some cases, that means a highly curated list of services with dead-simple pricing. In others, it means an opinionated serverless platform that makes deploying applications a breeze.
Cloudflare (NET -3.65%) is taking the latter route with its serverless Workers platform. With Workers, developers can deploy full-stack applications to Cloudflare's global fleet of edge servers. Code runs nearly instantly as close to the end user as possible.
Cloudflare has been building an ecosystem around Workers for the past few years, rolling out products including R2 object storage, Pub/Sub for messaging, and the D1 relational database. But there's been one glaring problem that has made the whole platform a non-starter for many potential customers, and Cloudflare finally has the pieces in place to fix it.
All about databases
Any useful web application needs some sort of database. There are countless database software options to choose from. In the world of relational databases, there's Oracle, Microsoft's SQL Server, and open-source options like MySQL and PostgreSQL. Outside of relational databases, there's the document-based MongoDB, key-value store Redis, and a slew of others. Some applications may use multiple databases, while others may stick to one. But somewhere, data needs to be persisted in an orderly, queryable way.
The one thing that almost all databases have in common is that they don't work over HTTP. In other words, hitting the database isn't just a simple API call. Databases generally use lower-level, long-lived TCP connections with custom protocols.
Up until now, Cloudflare's Workers did not support TCP connections. That means that a developer running a database somewhere else could not use Workers with that database without resorting to a middleman. A developer could set up a server application outside of Cloudflare that accepts API calls from a Worker, pulls data from the database, and returns it to the Worker, but the Worker could not access the database directly.
That's an annoying problem. Annoying enough, in all likelihood, to make Cloudflare Workers a non-viable option for many developers. The good news is that Cloudflare finally has the beginnings of a solution to this problem. On Tuesday, the company announced a new feature for Workers that allows outbound TCP connections.
Cloudflare Workers can now connect to any service that accepts TCP connections. There are some caveats, though. For connecting to databases, the database driver library a developer uses to initiate and manage the connection must explicitly support Cloudflare's solution. Cloudflare is working on broadening support, but there are currently big gaps.
Taking on AWS
Database access was the missing piece of the puzzle for Cloudflare workers. Once a Worker can connect directly to any database, the potential of the platform greatly expands. Suddenly, a developer hosting a database on AWS, or on any other cloud platform, can run their actual application on Cloudflare Workers, benefiting from the global reach of Cloudflare's network.
Serverless platforms like Cloudflare Workers take cloud computing and distill it down into deploying applications and not worrying about issues like scaling and performance. The platform takes care of all that. Compare this to the nightmare of managing complex cloud infrastructures on AWS, and you can see why serverless platforms are gaining in popularity.
With database access on its way to being a solved problem, Cloudflare Workers takes another step toward largely eliminating the need for a traditional cloud platform for developers and businesses.
