The first release is the serverless SQL D1 database. With this release, the GA platform also gets a number of features requested from the beta release, such as support for 10 GB databases, new data export functionality, and improved query debugging.

Other features that will be available in future versions of the platform include larger databases, more time travel capabilities for database branching, and new APIs for querying and creating databases.

Hyperdrive is the next version that Cloudflare has released. It allows users to transform regional databases into globally distributed databases.

Over the next few months, Cloudflare plans to add new features to Hyperdrive, including MySQL support, the ability to connect to databases on private networks, and more options to configure strategies and more.

The last of the company’s three new products is Workers Analytics Engine, which allows developers to add analytics capabilities to their products.

In addition to releasing the new products as GA, the company also announced two new features for its Queues product, which is in open beta. Users can now download messages and delay messages, which can be useful in situations where the underlying infrastructure has speed limits.

With support for SQL databases, NoSQL key/value storage, OCI registry support, and a variety of popular languages, Spin 1.0 meets the needs of today’s full-stack developer. Spin’s applications are built with serverless APIs, such as AWS Lambda and Azure Functions, for example. They’re also easy to build. Microsoft has integrated Fermyon Spin into its cloud offerings, and other software vendors are in the process of integrating it into their offerings.

“Cloud native development has been slow and tedious for developers. Fermyon wants to reverse that trend. We want to make serverless apps fast. Fast to develop, fast to deploy and fast to run”,

said Matt Butcher, co-founder and CEO of Fermyon.

“With Spin, a developer can go from blinking cursor to deployed application in 66 seconds. The open source ecosystem gathering around Spin is propelled forward by WebAssembly, the underlying technology. Spin 1.0 is the culmination of a year’s development, and we could not have reached this milestone without the enthusiasm, contributions and support of this rapidly expanding community”,

he continued.

On top of its already voluminous feature set, new features in Spin 1.0 include:

– Key-value store, PostgreSQL and Redis integration enabling stateful applications

– Support for the OCI Registry standard enabling standard packaging alongside Docker images

– Support for today’s most popular programming languages including Javascript/Typescript, Python, Rust, Go, Java and .NET

– Substantial command stability improvements for a better developer experience

– Extensibility including plug-ins and trigger(s) for expanded application scope

– End-to-end testing enabling confidence in code completion and stability

The new platform, Chainlink Functions enables the execution of custom computations on top of Web 2.0 APIs within minutes through its network.

“Our goal is to enable developers to combine the best of web3 smart contracts with the power of Web 2.0 APIs,”

El Moujahid said

Chainlink connects data in the chain to external systems to enable smart contracts to execute transactions based on real inputs and outputs. According to the platform’s website, it has enabled more than $7 trillion worth of transactions since mid-February.

Chainlink Functions hopes to be the bridge between the two parties to create mass adoption.

“Web3 is not going to be a binary thing. I’ve seen this in AI. The path to mass adoption was making it easy to embed AI into your apps. It’s the same with web3. You don’t have to build your entire app on-chain. It’s going to be a spectrum: part smart contract; part Web 2.0 APIs.”

El Moujahid said.

The new platform also supports more widespread programming languages such as JavaScript so that developers unfamiliar with Web3 can get into the field. It will also provide integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, and others.

With Meta for example, web3 developers can connect social media activities and small e-commerce businesses with a smart contract using Chainlink Functions and automatically trigger actions on-chain based on off-chain activities.

The platform’s serverless nature also means developers can stop worrying “about the overhead of managing and securing the infrastructure on which their code will run,”

El Moujahid said.

El Mujahid also shares that the platform is currently in private beta mode on Ethereum and Polygon’s test networks. Additionally, Chainlink plans to expand its functionality to more blockchains, add new integrations and tools, and launch on the main network as soon as possible.

For example during the US Election, the BBC News website received visits from over 165 million unique browsers from around the world.

“During the election week the Web Core stack averaged 80,000 requests per minute, peaking at 120,000 requests per minute to our platform. Those requests are the ones which made it past the traffic management layers (caches) in front of us. At its peak our edge traffic managers and CDNs saw 2.5 million page views per minute (around 41,000 requests per second),” writes Ishmael.

BBC engineers use serverless for two high CPU intensive areas of the application that require unpredictable scaling. The first is the React app that server-side renders the HTML, and “the second is the business logic layer, which transforms data from many different BBC systems into a common data model”. They are running over 100 million serverless function invocations per day.

Caching is done between the Lambda layers. It is performed to reduce function chaining, where one Lambda calls another Lambda and then waits for it to complete. This chaining incurs additional costs as Lambdas are charged proportionally to their execution time, even when they are idle. Another reason is to allow the backend serverless function to refresh the cache in the background without a user request having to wait for it.

“As an example, let’s take the breaking news story around the London Bridge attack in November 2019. The traffic profile at our edge cache for this page resulted in a 3x increase in traffic in a single minute (4k req/s to 12k req/s) followed by a near-doubling of traffic a few minutes later (12k req/s to 20k req/s).

These key moments are critical for the BBC, and they are the moments in which the audience turn to us. We must not fail. Any technology we choose must be able to respond to these traffic patterns.”

You can read Ishmael’s full blog post HERE.