Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 87 | Page 46

CIO OPINION runs or it doesn ’ t . It scales up and down as needed . You only pay for precisely what you need .
Secondly , it creates a more efficient compute platform which is better for everyone . It forces the compute platform ( e . g . us ) to be as efficient as possible . We have to be able to start code quickly for performance and scale up reasons . We need to efficiently use CPUs because no customer is paying us to keep idle CPUs around . And it ’ s better for the environment because cloud machines run at very high levels of utilization . This level of efficiency is what allows our platform to scale to the 10 million requests that Cloudflare Workers processed in the time it took you to read the last word of this sentence .
So whether you write your code by breaking it up into functions or ship large pieces of functionality or entire programs , the foundations of the Supercloud means that your code benefits from its efficiency . And more .
The Supercloud advantage
The Supercloud makes scaling easy because no one has to think about how many VMs to provision , no one has to keep hot standby VMs in case there ’ s a flood of visitors . Just as MapReduce ( which traces its heritage to the lambda calculus ) scales up and down , so should general purpose computing .
And it ’ s not just about scaling . In the Supercloud both code and data are mobile and move around the network . Attach data to the code ( such as with Durable Objects ; hello Actor model ) and you have a foundation for applications that can scale to any size and move close to users as needed to provide the best performance .
Alternatively , if your data is immovable , we move your code closer to it , no matter how many times you need to access it .
And this compute platform scales well beyond a machine , or a data center , or a country . With the right software ( which we ’ ve built ) it scales to the size of the Internet . Software allocates resources automatically across the globe , moving connections , data and processing around for high efficiency and optimal enduser experience .
Efficient compute and storage , a global network that ’ s everywhere everyone is , bound together by software that turns the globe into a single cloud . The Supercloud .
Welcome to the Supercloud
The Supercloud is performant , scalable , available , private and cost-efficient . Choosing a region for your application , or provisioning virtual machines , or working out how to auto-scale containers , or worrying about cold starts seems ridiculous , hard , anachronistic , a waste of time , rigid and expensive .
Happily , Cloudflare ’ s been building the alternative to that traditional cloud into our network and our developer platform for years . The Supercloud . The term may be new , but that doesn ’ t mean that it ’ s not real . Today , we have over a million developers building on the Supercloud .
Not only that but working at this level of flexibility means that code enforcing a data privacy or data residence law about where data can be processed or stored can operate at the level of individual users or objects . The same code can behave differently and even be executed in a completely different country based on where its associated data is stored .
Each of those developers wants to get code running on one machine and perfect it . It ’ s so much easier to work that way . We just happen to have one machine that scales to the size of the Internet : a global , distributed supercomputer . It ’ s the Supercloud and we build our own products on it , and you can join those one million developers and build on it too .
A Supercloud has two interesting effects on the cost of running a program . Firstly , it makes it more economical because you only run what you need . There ’ s never any need for committed VMs waiting for work , or idle machines you ’ re paying for just in case . Code either
We ’ ve been building the Supercloud for 12 years , and five years ago opened it up to developers through Cloudflare Workers . Cloudflare Workers was built for scale and performance since day one , by running on our global network . p
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