Cloudflare and APIs

Today the Cloudflare Workers team is thrilled to announce the launch of Cron Triggers. I know that this may not be all that revolutionary as an announcement, but given how pleasant I’ve found Cloudflare Workers to be, it is nice to see them becoming more useful. In case you aren’t familiar with cron, it is a scheduling mechanism, so this feature will allow your serverless function to run and predefined times or dates without someone hitting an HTTP endpoint.

Durable Objects provide a truly serverless approach to storage and state: consistent, low-latency, distributed, yet effortless to maintain and scale. They also enable coordination and real-time collaboration between clients. Now, this announcement is the one I’m most excited about. Even though it is in closed beta, and they haven’t let me in yet. Meant to compliment their existing storage option Workers KV, (which is optimized for read-heavy workloads), Durable Objects are consistent and live on the edge closest to the consumer of that object. So if you have an object to represent a user on app, that storage will happen at the location closest to that user based on their request to the Worker to access it. Just read the blog post. Also, this brings WebSocket support for Workers as well, which I am really looking forward to.

Abstract provides powerful APIs to help you enrich any user experience or automate any workflow. Used by 10,000+ developers worldwide. There are some general purpose things many apps need to do, like validate email addresses or phone numbers. Maybe look up IP geo-location, or holiday information. How about creating an avatar image? These are some of the options provided by Abstract APIs. You get 250,000 calls per month on the free plan.