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Cloudflare goes big on serverless with new command line, lures devs with free account tier

Major content wrangler adopts Wrangler as the official CLI

Ever-present content delivery network operator Cloudflare has rolled out a bunch of goodies for developers working with its serverless platform.

Devs using Cloudflare Workers to build their applications can now talk to the platform using Wrangler, an open-source command-line interface (CLI) project, revealed by the company in March.

Among other things, Wrangler can be used to compile Rust, C and C++ to WebAssembly; create single or multi-file JavaScript applications; install NPM dependencies; add KV namespaces and bindings; and deploy templates pre-made by CloudFlare.

Workers has also introduced a "free" subscription tier, in addition to "professional" and "business", that the company hopes will encourage experiments on the platform, with an allowance of up to 100,000 requests per day.

Cloudflare launched its take on serverless in 2018; Workers provides a lightweight JavaScript execution environment, built on Google's V8 JavaScript engine, that allows developers to create applications without having to configure or maintain any infrastructure.

It feels (or at least should) like the servers are not really there, hence serverless – the approach is also known as "function-as-a-service".

What makes Cloudflare's approach to serverless unusual is apps built on the platform are automatically propagated across its network of more than 175 data centres, without having to specify details like the cloud region they would live in, or the amount of memory they would need.

"Developers should be able to just focus on the code. Someone else should deal with everything else from setting up infrastructure through making that infrastructure fast and scalable," Rita Kozlov, product manager at Cloudflare, wrote in a blog post. ®

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