Recently, Cloudflare announced the general availability (GA) of Cloudflare Workers Unbound, a platform for applications like image processing or complex algorithms that need longer execution times.
Cloudflare Workers Unbound sits on top of the Cloudflare workers service available since 2017. It was first introduced last year in July as beta without restrictive CPU limits. Cloudflare Workers Unbound is now generally available. John Graham-Cumming, CTO Cloudflare, told InfoQ:
Since Cloudflare Workers Unbound was first launched in beta, we've seen immense demand from our community and heard incredible feedback from developers excited by our work to extend compute limits. With today's announcement of the general availability of CPU limits of up to 30 seconds for HTTP requests, everyone will have access to a cost-efficient serverless platform with the power to fuel almost any development project from enterprise applications to personal projects.
In addition to the GA release of Workers Unbound, the company also offers a private beta for Cron Triggers of up to 15 minutes for users who need even longer execution times. The Cron Workers have scheduled jobs invoked by Cron Triggers rather than triggered by HTTP requests.
According to a Cloudflare blog post, Unbound Workers' users, for instance, build an API leveraging the service that simulates DNA sequencing data, requesting subsets of a reference genome and streaming it back to the user. Robert Aboukhalil, bioinformatics software engineer at Invitae, wrote in a blog post on using WebAssembly and Cloudflare Workers to power genomics analysis:
Cloudflare Workers are particularly well-suited as they feature 0 ms initialization time (i.e., no "cold starts"), run at the edge (i.e., in a data center close to your users), and have a pricing model that doesn't require a degree in quantum physics to understand.
Source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-unbound-ga/
Other users like Thomson Reuters used Workers Unbound to build EverCache, a cache implementation designed to improve efficiency and load times across thousands of their partner websites.
Furthermore, customers can expect lower pricing for Workers Unbound and Durable Objects, Cloudflare's serverless storage within Workers as Graham-Cumming also told InfoQ:
As we work to make this technology accessible to everyone by halving egress costs, it's encouraging to see developers embracing our tech as they look for new and cost-effective alternatives to traditional serverless platforms.
And lastly, Workers Unbound is currently available to anyone with a Cloudflare Workers Paid subscription, and the pricing details are on the pricing page. The Cron Workers beta is accessible by signing up at the Cloudflare website.