...but we've consistently seen users complain about latency and we have observed Cloudflare does not run Workers in the nearest location to the user. This can been semi-confirmed via https://cloudflare-test.judge.sh Our endpoints are always routed to a destination which is not the nearest whilst other enterprise and business domains get served from a nearer location.
This can also be confirmed using Coudflare's own https://www.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace endpoint (substitute www.cloudflare.com with any of your Workers endpoint to see how differently it is routed. I've been told it might be fickleness of anycast routing and it could be). Disappointing since it is hard to get customer service reps to look at your support tickets when you're on a "free account" (despite paying for Workers).
We have no use for Cloudflare's other products and so it doesn't make sense to purchase pro/business subscriptions.
That said, I'd still recommend using it since it so darn fast.
Edit: Apologies to everyone for an unrelated rant. It was impulsive. I'm unable to delete this comment.
- Workers run in the colo that received the request. We currently literally have no capability to forward Workers requests to other colos. (It's possible we'll introduce that in the future, but it's not the case today.)
- Enabling Workers does not affect how your traffic is routed to colos. So if you're seeing Workers requests not going to the closest colo today, then regular non-Workers requests wouldn't either.
It sounds like the issue here is that your base Cloudflare plan is the "free" plan (confusingly-named because you're separately paying $5/month for workers on top of that).
When we have a colo that doesn't have enough capacity to handle all the local traffic, we often route free-plan traffic away from it, and they end up landing at the next-closest colo. This is completely unrelated to Workers -- it applies to any kind of Cloudflare traffic. If you upgrade to a higher plan level (e.g. pro at $20/month), you should see this happen much less often, if ever.
Sorry that this is confusing! We should probably document this better.
(I'm the lead engineer on Workers.)
I worked in tech for the past ~20 years and I've seen my fair share of exchanges like this one; your answer contains essentially everything I would have recommended:
- you clarified the issue
- you didn't take anything personally, but used a humble and warm approach to "defuse" the "rant"
- you admit the limitations of your company's current approach and immediately provide suggestions on how they can be improved (e.g. free plan being "confusingly-named", "We should probably document this better").
Only thing you might be missing is:
- Contact me at $email if I can be of further help
In any case, well done. Cloudflare has a great reputation and you are making it look even better.
I'd love to easily configure security headers so my sites are getting good ratings again, but I couldn't find it in the documentation and it doesn't seem like there's been any update to support this. Is your team working on making security headers easier to enable for workers or is there something I missed for setting this up?
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/new-and-improved-workers-docs/
(@kaycebasques cool stuff with Lighthouse and other docs, btw!)
We also published as part of this release some documentation for the so-called “Docs engine” which powers these new docs, which may somewhat answer this question.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/docs-engine
(Note: They currently live within the Workers docs site for now but will get a proper home soon.)
With respect to the information architecture and content design, much of that is discussed in the Contributor’s Guide [1] and Docs-flavored Markdown [2] pages.
The very short version is that we borrowed many ideas from Divio’s documentation system [3], which recommend dividing your content into four distinct buckets: Tutorials, How-to Guides, Explanation, and Reference.
The layout and visual design were inspired by dozens of other docs sites we tested and studied, stealing the best ideas we could from everywhere we looked.
It’s also worth noting that the Cloudflare Workers docs have been open-sourced for over a year now [4], and these new docs (as well as the new engine which powers them) will continue to carry the same license. Contributions are welcome and we’re hopeful and excited to see further uses of the docs engine over time.
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/docs-engine/contri...
[2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/docs-engine/docs-f...
[3] https://documentation.divio.com/
(edit: formatting)
https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-docs-engine
By "off-GitHub" do you mean you'd prefer there were some other way to edit the docs directly? Mind if I ask why?
