Review: Cloudflare Worker

I recently tried a product from Cloudflare, Cloudflare Workers. Starting from seeing the paid version which starts at $5 I was immediately interested in trying it, because when compared to similar services such as Vercel or Netlify which cost up to $20 and $19 dollars it is really far. But of course I was a little skeptical whether the features of the service were the same or more than Vercel or Netlify.

Introduction

According to Wikipedia Cloudflare is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, wide area network services, reverse proxy, Domain Name Services, ICANN-accredited domain registration, and other services. Cloudflare is well known as a network service around the world. Users range from large to small companies and personal use. Based on the official website

Cloudflare Workers is a service that provides a serverless execution environment that allows you to create new applications or add to existing applications without the need to configure or maintain infrastructure. Cloudflare Workers runs on Cloudflare's global network in hundreds of cities around the world, offering both Free and Paid plans.

First introduction to Cloudflare

I first learned about Clouflare Wokers from someone tweeting on social media X (I forgot the link to the post). At that time he tweeted with surprise that the Cloudflare Workers service was really cheap compared to other services such as Vercel or Netlify (only $5 for the paid version). Knowing this, I was interested in trying the service.

Learning about Cloudflare Workers

A few days later, I started learning about Cloudflare Workers. I learned about the service from Cloudflare's official documentation. I think the documentation is not clear and complete in explaining the features and how to use the Cloudflare Workers service. Therefore, I also looked for references from other articles and used Chat AI.

Trying Cloudflare Workers

After I felt enough information I got. I also tried it with the Nextjs Framework. In the official documentation there is a guide to using services with the Nextjs Framework, but the status is still beta, but I don't mind it. At that time I tried it by creating my web portfolio (I wanted to create it for a long time but was always constrained by time 🙂 ).

Unlike Vercel, using the Cloudflare Workers service with Nextjs requires an adapter from OpenNenxt, namely @opennextjs/cloudflare. @opennextjs/cloudflare is an adapter that is needed so that the results of the nextjs build can be read by the Cloudflare Workers service. After that you need to add a configuration file, add a runner script to package.json and so on (more details can be read in the Nextjs Framework Guide.

After all the set-up was done, I tried to run my project locally with the Cloudflare Workers environment using Cloudflare's wrangler library. But before it can be run locally, the project must be built first using @opennextjs/cloudflare, the library will create a nextjs build that is compatible with Workers. After that, you can run the project locally with the Workers environment.

The first time I did this, I immediately got an error. The first error I got was an error because I was using Windows, apparently opennext lacks support for Windows. So I moved my project to Ubuntu WSL. The previous error no longer appeared but other errors arrived, such as:

1. Error because it does not support module crypto.createCipheriv The error occurred because I was using Auth.js (NextAuth.js). In the Auth.js documentation, in order to use it in the Edge Runtime, you need to enable JWT mode. However, after I tried to enable it, the error still occurred. The solution, is to create custom encode and decode in Auth.js with the help of the jose library which uses WebCrypto for encryption.
2. Error because it doesn't support Neon module(?) The error occurred because I used ORM drizzle with database services from Turso. In the documentation, to use this ORM in the Edge Runtime is required to use import @libsql/client/web.

Actually there are more errors that I haven't mentioned because I forgot the details of the errors I experienced when developing using Workers. After I felt there were no more errors on local, I tried to deploy on Cloudflare Workers. Several times the error was due to trivial problems, but after several errors I found an error that I could not solve. The error was caused by the size of my application bundle being more than 3MB (after compression) for the free version and 10MB for the paid version.

I was really surprised, because it turns out that the size limit is intended for the entire application bundle memory, I mean until the libraries intended for the Frontend (such as: three.js, react-three-fiber, etc.) are counted too. I guess only code related to the server side is counted in the memory limited by Cloudflare Workers. I think even if you subscribe to the paid version 10MB is still not enough for complex applications. Then because I was in a hurry to deploy my web, I immediately moved it to Vercel :).

Conclusion

Indeed, $5 per month is too good to be true, there must be something wrong!. But after I looked at Cloudflare services again, maybe I should change to the Workers For Platform service which costs $25 (I'd rather move to Vercel). I'm a bit annoyed that I've lost a lot of time due to errors, but never mind. Maybe I made a mistake that made the bundle size big or I need to use dynamic import. But as I said earlier, I didn't want to waste any more time, so I decided to move on.