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Jamstacked Issue 82

Cloudflare's big changes to Workers and Pages

Published: Jun 1, 2023

Your Jamstack update
 

#​82 — June 1, 2023
✦ web version

Cloudflare likes to do giant, periodic 'release dumps' for their products, so it can often be easy to miss the pieces most relevant to you, but their updates around how Pages and Workers combine for app deployment are very interesting.

In particular, their "smart placement" begins to address the issue of where a Worker sits in relation to where its data sits. Because Workers were replicated across the globe, in some cases there could actually be added latency depending on which node the user's request hit in relation to the location of the data. This aims to address that by automatically placing the Worker in the optimal location.

Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ What's Good

Making Cloudflare the Best Place for Your Web Apps
Cloudflare announced some big changes to how Workers interact with apps deployed to Pages. First, they use “smart placement” to determine the best node(s) to deploy your Workers too, which can help if your application interacts with things like a database that is deployed to a single region. There’s also a new version of Wrangler, their CLI, and increased memory, CPU, and application size limits.

Igor Minar

Cloudflare Workers Introduces connect() API to Create TCP Sockets
Cloudflare announced a Worker API to create outbound TCP sockets which can make it possible to directly connect to many databases like MySQL, for example.

Renato Losio

Astro 2.5
A big release including data collections that are JSON/YAML static files in your src/content/ folder, hybrid rendering to allow combining of SSG/SSR routes in a single site and much more.

Astro

Dodging the Vercel Storage Tax: There Are Open-Source Alternatives
Recently Vercel announced a number of storage options for serverless using Postgres, Redis, and Blob. These aim to provide a better development experience, but do come at a markup over the underlying services. This post covers how to avoid that markup by using a free and open source alternative called WunderGraph (note that WunderGraph also has a competing commercial cloud offering).

Prithwish Nath

✂︎ Tools, Resources & More...

❖ TIDBITS

Getting Started with View Transitions On Multi-Page Apps
View Transitions for multi-page apps (MPAs) and static sites are ready for testing behind a flag in Chrome 113+ and require no JavaScript and minimal CSS. Dave shows how to implement them in a Jekyll site.

Dave Rupert

Exploring Next.js Server Components
Still in need of an introduction to Server Components? This one clocks in at just a couple of minutes to read in full.

Bobby Hall Jr

Using Clerk for Seamless, Full-Stack Authentication in Next.js
How to implement auth in Next.js using Clerk, an authentication and user management solution designed specifically for React.

Zevi Reinitz

Eleventy Displaying Posts from Another Site
How to pull and display a list of content from a JSON or RSS feed on an external site using Eleventy (and how to generate that JSON feed if you need it).

John M. Wargo

Thanks for reading. — Brian