Pretty fantastic (not an employee of cloud flare or anything, just a happy customer). They have this concept of mini flare that you can host a tiny cloud flare on your dev box/CI pipeline so it makes it easy to run unit tests and the like.
I don’t have the hardware to self host it. The value of this is that it’s an operating system for planet scale computers. It deploys your process across a global super computer with 100+ data centers.
Most code I’ve rolled on Workers is simple because it’s just business logic (the OS takes care most of the heavy lifting that adds bloat to other code bases). Migrating a few 1000 lines of JS isn’t a big deal. I just don’t have very many places I could move it to.
Lambda is region bound. I could do lambda@edge which is closer. But self hosting it on an R620? I could probably roll an API compatible wrapper that loads my worker into a node process on a standard server and plug it into a colo rack, would take me a few hours, but that’s not comparable.
This idea of self hosting and building portable abstractions I feel is jumping the gun. We are just starting to figure out how to build operating systems for datacenter scale computers, but standardization is still a ways out there. Planet scale is a whole ‘nother level, and we’ve got a long ways to go to figure out what the right abstractions are for computers of this scale.
