A Cloudflare-Shaped Hole

It's been almost a year since Cloudflare Pages and Workers were blocked for me. I thought I was fine, but it turned out that all the alternatives lacked speed, which I really care about. So today we're going to test many Workers alternatives and hopefully find a good one. Methodology: time to serve "hi" (NOT STATIC) from the nearest free server to my home network.

Why is Cloudflare blocked? Because it became a common place to host "games", so now I have to find more niche places.

Why do I need servers?

• I can't trust the client. I can't give it my API keys or assume that it hasn't been tampered with.
• CORS. Many APIs need the server.

Classical cloud (VM/containers)

GCP

It's a bit legacy but I can work with it.

Latency to running VM is 40-50ms (e2-micro in us-west1).

Latency to code (Cloud Run Function) is higher, like 60-80ms. When cold it gets as high as 2.2 seconds, although this might be better than a VM. Still us-west1.

I won't be using Cloud Run since it requires building the container on device and using someone else's container registry (👎), but the demo container (serves more than hi) is also 60-80ms.

Azure

Surely the company from Redmond will be friendly and fast. Surely.

Well, I've used Azure before, but it seems I can't anymore. My school Azure account errors with "you might be signing in from a browser, app, or location that is restricted by your admin", and when I tried to verify my personal account (in case they now want you to use personal accounts for student benefits?) the benefits never came and trying again just errored.

I can tell you this, from the services I deployed there already, though: the latency is also bad. On Functions, a wrapper around a 500ms API call takes 2 seconds cold and 600-1000 ms warm. That's 100-500ms of latency.

Amazon

I accidentally racked up a $100 AWS bill when I was 10. Never again.

Containers-based

Fly

Fly is the most lovable cloud company there is, and the latency is great: 40ms-60ms.

Code-based

Deno Deploy

Drawbacks: in California and serverless. Means ~200ms latency.

Val Town

Drawbacks: in Ohio and serverless. Means 270-400ms latency.

Fastly

Fastly has a thing where if you make requests in quick succession, they take 10-20ms. In JS, this happens often, although when it doesn't it takes 500ms or so to run. With WASM, it's more of a consistent 60-100ms.

Baselines (currently blocked)

Cloudflare Workers

80-100ms.

Vercel

Vercel's the fastest... just for static assets? Their home page is 3x faster than Cloudflare's, but their Functions take 160-180 ms by default and 150-170ms when the region is manually configured.

Conclusion

VMs and containers mean complicated off/on management, containers mean complicated abstractions, and serverless can mean taking a penalty for every request. But I'm walking away with a plan.

This is a bar chart of the latency of each service I tested. It shows 4 services with better-than-Workers latency, all unblocked, all free, and diverse in function. I'm excited to use them.