Pros + Cons of JavaScript Servers, Serverless, and Cloudflare Workers

So I kind of just like Emden had through them. And I thought, like, why don't we do a show to answer this question on Linux servers your your workers locally hosted server or whether it's Next. Js or begin So So you hear it. Maybe we should do an entire show on what is the edge. I know. I know. Right? Because you you hear that a lot. And yeah, so that's part of it what is it? Fastify is just, like, Work a 100% in serverless environment because of So the idea is that you you sort of break up

that one lesson Vercel because it's going to be serverless.

third party APIs in my projects because then launch that website.

But, yeah, it could just as easily be an endpoint

Either one. And and, specifically, the question was here. It's like, if I'm building, like, a whole bunch of back end logic, Askify or Here goes your memory. Yeah. Like a perfect example is often people will save, like, sessions IDs into memory, which is not a good idea because that will eventually run out and your server will crash. That's are nothing in compared to the price and performance Node. Js APIs. So anything like FS

the pros and cons of choosing So if you think about,

Fastify or Express on a traditional They are the cloud computing It's not about just put a 100% of your code inside of the request handler. It's do 80%. And that makes again that other benefits to that. It makes it more testable. It makes it more reusable.

for and I I say traditional additional not to mean that they're old, but that's just the kind of the way that we initially started building apps in no JS and still is but you also don't have access to any of the Node. Js APIs. You just have access to JavaScript APIs Next one we have here is serverless functions. So, on

each of these frameworks, whether it's with, Do you wanna kick it off? Yeah. Yeah. So this is, like, a good question because I the other day, So a lot of them will do tree shaking. Well, they're just like, oh, I can figure out what you need, and we won't bundle installing everything yourself.

Or I could run it on serverless functions. And we'll talk about what those are and pros and cons to it. Or my other option was I could host it on Cloudflare Workers, which is, like, kind of another serverless option, but it's a it's kind of its own beast.

you're just collecting that initial endpoint, servers, serverless, and CloudFlare workers, some of the pros and cons of each approach to hosting

fairly easily. The stuff that is specific to for what should you do. The answer is it depends as always, and I think that's it. Yeah. Thanks for tuning in. Peace. Peace.

like, what do I put it in the Next. Js API folder or do I, like, make my own And then but also on the flip side is, oh my gosh.

Express Oh, trade offs. Trade offs. Trade offs. Try offs. So hopefully that answers your question The pros and cons. So pro, pretty easy to use. You get a box.

AWS.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because I I mean, I run level up tutorials. Our API is a separate node application.

and that's I think that's about it.

I can recreate the entire API. It's very simple. You you send it a search like chicken, and it brings you back a list of an image, a list of ingredients, Sessions across all of the different ones. So Mhmm. That's a con. Any other cons you can think of? The that's the biggest one to me is that it's the scaling is a little bit trickier than it was with some of these other options. It just feels more complex. I think there are more You can move from one to another pretty easily.

From an endpoint route in SALT kit So each time you publish an article on your blog, a markdown version of it is pushed to a GitHub repo as in, Hey. Even if this blog goes away, you'll you'll never lose that content because it seems like you're never gonna lose access to your GitHub. Right?

a traditional How do I start it? Right? There there's no starting it because it starts itself when a request comes in, and it stops itself when you're done. Right? I always wondered that. So okay. So I don't like I said, I don't do much serverless. So you're connecting to a DB And it's kind of like you kind of look at it, like, So, like, almost nothing. Like, if you search any package, you would imagine you would you would hope for it to work.

and then you're handling it the same way. The the hardest part again is just knowing any sort of the weird quirks and features of any individual platform or having to deal with. I I mean, I I think when you have, like, a traditionally hosted server, it's really easy to just not have to worry about anything. You have an application that's up and running. But when you do get into the service serverless world, you do there are some things to worry about whether that is the size of the application.

What are the else what else is there? I don't know. I always just think about

And in most cases, they just use the Lambda API.

From one thing to another So I could build it in a an app like that and then host it on some server and run it forever.

And we just display it on the page. Very, very simple. So I was like, okay. You know what? I can make I can make the same API.

folder that has it? And the answer at the end of the day is most of the stuff will port every single route that you hit is a good example or every single piece of work that needs to be done. Download a CSV, resize an image, query a database, bring back some JSON.

Yeah. Netlify functions are built on top of it.

reducing stuff, rendering out templates, and then you send it to the thing. So I I would say like 80% of your work is actually done in the middle, which should not change much environment to environment.

doesn't work when that thing doesn't. So what I did is I said, alright, you know what? Here's 55 of them. They're just like 55 random packages.

Sometimes they have a custom API built on top of it.

Yeah. Because if you have, like, a GraphQL endpoint, it's one endpoint that's your entire application, really.

a

Don't run Node.

which is sort of a beast of its own. I've used it, I think, 3 times now. Have you ever have you dipped your toes into this yet, Scott? I have done no toe dipping into Cloudflare workers No toe dipping or serverless functions. It's it's wild for me that I I've Haven't done either of these, but, yeah,

Linux server when you're doing this.

packages that just work on node don't necessarily And let's say my website got really busy, but Scott's website wasn't doing much. He'd be like, hey. Scott's website could use a little bit of help. And Scott's little serverless functions would run over

Like a big one for a long time was Phantom JS.

essentially, what a serverless function does is it tries to zip all of the stuff you need, stuff. It's it's a little bit easier, I think, in serverless function land, especially if you're starting And there are ways to get it to work, but a lot of these times, these, that has all of these things installed. Like they'll probably have a MERN image that has is being written in functions that do things like database queries, looping over data, reducing stuff, database queries, looping over data, that people get in return or are sometimes a little bit different from platform to platform.

And the last 1 we have here is some packages won't work because they are simply too large.

and you can you can

every route or every every function into its own serverless function, and it will only include its things that it needs to to work. Yeah. Actually, it's fun. It's all kit just got

dumb guy outlook on this. So Cloudflare their workers essentially something that is

Like, event listeners on the Twitter Firehose API. Right? Like, that's that's not a good use case for serverless functions because you would need to constantly be listening for something.

server side code splitting for that purpose, for that explicit purpose. Oh, yeah. That's That's really handy because some of them make you explicitly tell you what package you need for every single serverless function.

version of JavaScript, which was wild to me when I found that out. So, that. So the You don't until you are frustrated that some you get a random cryptic message,

Actually, run an entire express server in a serverless function.

Cloudflare workers and

But at a certain point, you're going to have too many dependencies SS. Oh, SSL. You're right. Thank you. I was like, Wait. Okay. You can't. Yeah. Okay. So you got to provision your own certificates, all that. Again, that stuff is is much easier than it was even 5 years ago, but still it's it's up to you to sort of take care of that stuff. And a lot of people are just expected to work, which is when you go with a service, they'll do that for you.

from from my understanding, let me give a little little,

with this is I was using JS DOM just to scrape a page, pull the recipes off which is a pro and a con, which is great because if you just need to save something like an image.

now that we have, I guess, that,

Or Cloudflare workers using something like

Should I put this in my API folder, or should I run it on my own? And if I do put it in my API folder, like,

and it runs on your computer and it replicates the Cloudflare Worker key.

80% of the or 90% of the meat of your application, I haven't specifically done with MongoDB, so I don't know if I can talk developers trust.

I'm wondering even as a As as the same as this user here. Should I move my API into

Next. Js

what what is your call there, Wes, if you were making that call? Or or establish a connection to that database.

So I found this one called Linkdom,

That stuff kind of obfuscated for you. Seems like the way to get into it.

like,

which is meant to run-in either web workers or do you know it would work in as well?

Like, the the whole baseline here.

Lambda, a description,

Mhmm. Just so we don't go over crazy amount of time. When we're thinking about this stuff as it pertains to the initial question,

I specifically ran into this with, But like a webhook would be a good use case for serverless functions because it's and then then adapt it to the request and and the response

because there's a lot of, Like, bumps in, like, oh, but those limitations And that's why sometimes people will go for a new a whole new entirely database approach as well when they move over to serverless. Not to say it can't be done with MongoDB. Certainly even MongoDB themselves has a serverless

proprietary node APIs.

What it does should be in a lib folder somewhere.

a Cloudflare Worker setup or something like that within SvelteKit, Or should I keep it as a separate API? Like,

like serverless functions on AWS, Cloudflare put this, like, website out called Works With Workers,

or any of these things where they have their,

What essentially does that mean in terms of of your use case? And for me, if I was wanting to get into serverless functions, You would have to reestablish

And it used to be that you couldn't even run Everyone would do the work, and they go, oh, wow. That was a lot of CSVs I had to generate. And then they'd all put the blanket on and eventually fall asleep. Right? Is that makes sense? Sounds sounds right to me. I like the metaphor.

environment. But, you you know, like, that's always a bit of a bummer when, like, you try to replicate the environment as close as possible. Then you get into those, like, well, it works on my machine, team. But when I deploy it after I wait 6 minutes for it to to build, it doesn't. So that's a bit of a bummer as well.

Should I keep this thing online? Are people even using it? Am I paying for this to host it? You know, like, all of that, And essentially, it's just you get a request, you do some stuff, and you send the result back. The getting the request and the sending the result or disk space or CPU or any of these things that you need to allow you to sort of drag and drop these You can just save it to the folder.

Head on over to syntax.fm

I've had 0 issues doing that. Yeah. That's the whole thing. Right? It it's you know what? I I do like that. It's also very, very cheap to do it. Like, it's also my entire business on Couple $100 a year. Yeah? Yeah. Totally. Especially modern servers. Like, we're on render.com, and that is very cheap for 1 single container of a node Node site. You up it just a little bit, and you're still getting really good performance for a couple $100 a year. And that Yeah. Yeah. That that node server for me, then one of the cool things too with that that we maybe didn't touch on is that it's it's easier to version and release new updates or something like SvelteKit

Because when you realize, you know what? This is not going to work in workers or, oh, I wrote this for Express Server, but I now want to host it on, or, And the whole idea with serverless functions is that packages I think that regardless of which approach you take,

It's just functions that do things.

any of these modern systems that that kinda hide all of the complexities of these things. So I don't know. Yeah. It

like, I mean, I agree. It's there's so many, like,

If it's in its own self contained thing in a maybe not not necessarily traditional burst for serverless but like verse in in the API and the next JS site verse having its own thing. It now becomes something else you have to manage, but you can manage it, and it gives you a little bit more control there. So let me try to get this and then you can correct me. Is it is it a serverless type of function that just runs closer to the edge, essentially. Yeah.

just for the API and running your or drop a review if you like this show.

it's a tough call for me. I I should maybe even just, like, dive into some of these things a little bit more and gain some experience there. I I'll also say one more thing is that

you don't necessarily have to to worry about, Cloudflare has its own All of those things are functions. Right? They they do something in response to a request. They do something and return a result.

Nice to tease now that exist to avoid having to get into the difficulty of these things, whether that is using begin architect or,

from scratch and you're not trying to port something over. So there's there's that as well. But that. That said, or Koa. Any of these, like, traditional

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that needs to live inside your API folder because that's how you actually handle the response.

Scott and I both host our course platforms on

I think that and this is how I approach a lot of my things that I'm building quickly is just, yeah, like write a lot of your code Instead of having a server that handles your entire application, serverless or what are the what are the other? There's so many different options out there for for serverless side.

that you have there. And that will make you much happier to going serverless first So there's there's that as well.

Interesting. Yeah. Cool. I mean,

what was the question? random APIs. So I don't think that was a very good, like, marketing choice on their end to launch that, and send the response free.

the 1st version, which is traditionally hosted Linux servers, and Throw your next node. Js product or throw any product. You can run Ruby or

is that So, like, I don't know. You've got, like, a large website with 60 routes.

What should you do? What should you do? So The benefit it's it's very easy to host a lot of these projects. Often, you can find places to do it for

node server or go server or any type of server. I'm talking about hash node

But more than just that, you actually write your your posts

this is all really, really super neat. So give HashNote a try, especially if you're looking to start up a blog, new year, new you. Gotta,

side JavaScript.

server

by default, then we're worrying about SSL certificates, edge caching with SSL.

soft skill, web development, the hastiest, the craziest, the tastiest TS Webb development treats coming in hot. Here is Wes Barracuda

the ownership of your content.

Did you realize there's no 2 nodes? Yeah. Hash node and And we're talking about node today. Hash node, Linode, talking about node. Yeah. So, Hashnode is basically everything you need to have to start a blog. Hashnode.com,

Try something new. Start start something different, and maybe, create a blog on Hashnode. So give it a try. Let's talk about another node company, Linode.

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Open wide dev fans, get ready to stuff your face with JavaScript, CSS, node modules, barbecue tips, get workflows, breakdancing,

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There's built in newsletter stuff, HTTPS You can obviously use your own URLs to link to your own site.

Monday. Monday. Monday.

and it's really super cool because, Well, one of the things that we always talk about is the ownership of your content. And what I love about Hash Notes approach is that they really push

in markdown, and you own all of the data. It's extremely easy to export all of the data. You can have it, backed up to GitHub.

Welcome to Syntax. In this Monday, hasty treat. We're gonna be talking about JavaScript

and Linode.

Boss and Scott

a dependency when somebody hits that URL.

950.

APIs the page and to render it out to an API. I mean, I was using JS Dom for that because I just like I quickly like I wrote it in node and it worked. I'm like, okay, good. Now let's connect it to an API. Let's try Cloudflare Workers. And then like And then it didn't work. And then I found out it's because JS DOM doesn't work in Cloudflare Workers because it it requires, You got to have a 60 package JSON. That sounds like a nightmare to me.

error message.

an NPM network with Cloudflare Workers.

You don't have access to the DOM or any of the browser APIs,

any of the performance

you all to use it. You npm install your dependencies The cons of that is it requires you to rethink how you do some things. So you don't really start your app. That's a big one for people. They're like, okay. Like, I got my app on on Vercel or Netlify.

So I'll go through some of the cons So how do you know? you can put your JavaScript. So check it out at linode.comforward/syntax.

And you will be going if you decide to go all in on Cloudflare Workers, You'll hit a lot of those initial bumps and scrapes in terms of picking your tech. But for a lot of people, that is well worth it. It's the same thing with with,

and then an additional set of webworker APIs that help you do things inside of that webworker.

It's the API for it is almost exactly the same as web workers. So So if you were to imagine that you are running something in the browser and you send off some something to happen in web workers, you're in web workers are a bit weird because, like, you're not in the browser.

It's probably not on there because there's 55 which has a worker and you can use they have all kinds of services. Just the Linux servers that host node projects is just one of the many, many different services that they offer.

One of the weirdest thing to me, and this is the thing that tripped me up the most, is that,

They won't they where they say there is 20,000 of it because they have most of the pros of serverless as well.

And it's okay because it's just JavaScript, but it's not node and JS at the end of the day.

But any package that has very popular way.

do I wanna get into this? So this is it? Then they say 20,000, but they only list 55. So, like, what are the other? So third one, Cloudflare Workers,

They run their own version of JavaScript. I'm not sure what engine it is, but they have been developing this over the years.

if you just want to use For that entire website to run, and it will be too large to fit into a serverless function.

Some of that stuff does it scares me. I mean, it it that that kind of that kind of thing is directly the type of thing that would scare scare me, because I would say,

Yeah. You know, I think you don't see that as much anymore. Yeah. Yes. Alphabet Stack. Yep. I'm new to the MERN app development, and I was wondering When you use a framework like Next. Js,

which are kind of a newer way of having Now my name is Scott Talinski. I'm a developer from Denver, Colorado. And with me, as always, is Wes Bos. Hey, everybody. Hey, Wes. This episode is sponsored by 2 amazing companies, one of which would be a great place to host your blog, and another one would be a great place to host your own

are there trade offs to building the API in the Next. Js forward slash API folder first creating a separate back end outside of Next. Js land. So what we're gonna be doing is using this as sort of like a a jump to kick off talking about,

to kick this off, we we got a question into our potluck that says, I'm new to

to host your JavaScript, your node environment, and Linode is a perfect place to do that. So you sign up. They're gonna give you a $100 in free credit, for running your app on Cloudflare Workers. Interesting. So okay. So So responding to, like, you or there's a whole bunch of them.

Your nodes, your digital oceans, those types of of systems, and then you have serverless functions, well, we have, like, typically with node servers that you would run via probably on a Linux box somewhere.

one the APIs that I use. It's called the recipe puppy, and we use it in one of my courses.

server side code. And then we're also gonna be talking about Cloudflare Workers.

syntax for $100 in free credit. Thank you, Linode, for sponsoring. Sick. Okay. Cool. So this actually, this entire episode as some of our our hasty treats have been started off as a a pollock question, and the pollock question because

But this is one that I would encourage you to check out after today's that little API.

a episode because we're going to be talking about the different MongoDB already installed or,

or go or you can run literally anything that you can run on Linux, which is everything separately

MERNSTACK.

was one that required a deep enough answer or could really facilitate a deep enough conversation that we could turn it into a whole episode. So, I think there's, like, some startup time stuff in involved in on that. But then again, I don't work that much with serverless, so I'm sure you can speak much. Yeah. Much more educatedly about it. Alright. Well, talk about pros and cons. 1st one, traditionally hosted Linux server.

React, and Express, React, and Node. Node. Okay. You got it. You got it. Okay. I remember the mean stack. I never I never I guess I did use the MERN stack. Yeah. The the mean stack was like the mean stack really popped because, like, what a sweet name that is. You know? Yeah. And every at that point, like, every stack had, like, a name. It was, like, really trendy to name all your stacks.

on Linode. It's awesome. Check it out. Linode.comforward/ These again, these processes start up when they're requested data, and they shut down when they're done. So if you have a long running process, like an example would be I didn't really want to pay $5 for the rest of my life to host that API.

What what is the MERN stack, Wes? It's Mongo, Express,

where you sort of keep a connection live, and then you share that Or in my case, it worked on Cloudflare Workers. So I was happy about that. But I feel like

you only pay for what you need. So if you've if you need to Make a CSV

10,000 people need CSVs right now.

you query the database, you do your work, You make a CSV and then you send it back to the the user. And then as far as the serverless function is done, it is concerned. It says, I'm done. You might need me in 3 seconds. You might need me in 3 years, but I'm going to sleep. Right? And that's not Entirely true because they do stay warm for 15 minutes and whatnot, but that's kind of the idea in that They got a blanket on. Yeah. Exactly. They put a blanket on to you. Like, you know what? I'm gonna I'm gonna hang around for a couple minutes in case you need me again.

wanted to have a process that,

Holy crap. Let me get some of my friends in here. Hey.

and say, hey, I'm happy to help out. Let me do a little bit of that work.

You're only paying for the time that they are actually doing work.

It can be very cheap to run stuff. And this is a good example of

The when the request comes in, that's what happens. It's like request comes in, and I establish connection to the database, Then I do work that's in the database. Then I disconnect. Yeah. And there's if you think about, like, a traditional database, like MongoDB,

of out of a database.

What else? No long running processes. So, if you

database. Right?

was running for

16 days or whatever.

With serverless functions, it's It's not that it's not going to be that popular. Very, very simple. It's going to be very, very cheap, if not free, to run this thing indefinitely for the rest of my life. What else? It's pretty easy to move over. That's from other serverless stuff.

It just takes a little bit of a different approach to handling that.

There is some approaches that people take, that is called connection pooling, Some packages don't work in serverless environment because they require, like, native low level bindings.

50 milliseconds or less. Right? Yeah. And if you if you can't go over that in some cases, so it's not a good case for that.

sort of scale up. So

and set up your SSL certificates. You got to set up your own. Like, I run engine x on mine.

and that will be gone. So that's why a lot of people use Redis The move from one to another is not going to be as bumpy as it might have been previously.

these Our, like, transient environments, meaning that with serverless, they start up. And anything written to disk, you can do it. But by the time that thing spins down, meaning that it turns off.

for sure has Node. Js installed and npm installed, all that good stuff. You. Full control over the server. You get this disk disk access,

which is like things like like a couple of years ago, there's a huge thing, like heartbleed. And they they would upgrade the servers for you, but they're not gonna They're not going to upgrade your PHP version for you. They'll give you And then generally with serverless,

including logs. So if you wanna just have some simple logs, usually, the the service will give you some logging. But if if you need to have more in-depth logs, you need to send that data off to a third party logging service. Yeah. So that means, like, if you're doing any kind of caching, you'd probably want to do so in an external service, like a a Reddit service or something because what that. Yeah, that caching is only going to live in the life of the memory, which again, when that is shut down

an image they're trying to keep a lean environment, and they don't give you access to an entire

your. But a lot of people still do it and super well to it. But Whatever is on there is gone. So you can't put, like, long living things on there, the recipe puppy API that I made SSH. If you wanna if you wanna SSH search, It's much easier than it used to be, but you still have to go in there,

the amount of because it runs in its own environment. So they're coming. They made this thing called Mini Flare, which is pretty sweet, And then the remaining 10, 20%, which is How do you take the request and you can use your bundlers and all that stuff that you want.

most of these services will allow you to increase places where you can,

you have White, yeah.

they can clean it up and whatnot I'll just sit it on top of, like, all recipes or something like that, but I'll just make it so that the API works exactly the same way. The only thing you have to change is the actual URL that you're hitting. So I was like, okay, what do I build this in? Do I build it in Like, let's say, my website and Scott's website were both hosted on serverless functions.

You generally, you SSH into it, which is kind of like logging into the terminal Someone hits that URL, it's specifically pinged in that it runs it will actually run on the actual server that is closest to the user. But

of the actual server.

We do need a seller. SSAH

sliders and and get more of that. But at a certain point, it makes sense not to just put have a bigger computer, but to have many, sometimes will work and sometimes will not work.

You get full control over that server. You are responsible for

SS. What did I say? H medium mediocre computers that handle the requests on each and getting into that. And you get into load balancers. And then it gets a little bit complicated, especially if you're trying to share things like

memory the early days of the rest of it. Totally.

in order to save stuff that needs to be transient or across. Like, Like, even even in traditionally hosted express, it's a response dot JSON. Whereas, And that if you're just goofing around,

Yeah. SSH.

a that's the approach because, yeah, then that's kind of like, Oh, it takes, like, a couple milliseconds to connect to the database. In some of these serverless functions, they expect you to do everything in Specifically today in this podcast, we're going to be talking about, Here's my next point is that like a con of this is it's a little bit harder to offering.

Often these hosts will sort of add a layer of help on top, response or reply dot send. You know, it's like a little bit different, but, like, at the end of the day, most of your code Yeah. It's like They're most of them most of them are built on top of AWS or one of the other big players, Google, Microsoft, whatever their their serverless offerings. AWS is by far the biggest player in the space. Netlify functions.

the pros of serverless is that or maybe we should just explain really quickly. Serverless is that It went down. And this is like I'm starting to realize I shouldn't use

Things you have to know about in the platform.