Building a startup on Workers and Supercloud?

Developers Workers
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Hi everybody,

I am the founder of a startup and because of Cloudflare’s fast release of new innovative services in combination with initiatives like Cloudflare for Startups and the Workers Launchpad Funding Program, we are thinking about building our SaaS product on Workers and Supercloud instead of GCP or AWS.

To make the right decisions, we wonder if there are design recommendations from Cloudflare how to build a bit more complex things on their infrastructure. We have built “server-less” before on GCP and are eying a similar architecture again, but also make some changes. This was our setup on GCP:

  • Backend: Lots of separate Cloud Functions exposing a part of a central API.
  • Queues: Cloud Tasks
  • User interface: React communicating through an API, both hosted on Google App Engine
  • Authentication: Google App Engine behind IAP in conjunction with Identity Platform, see here.
  • API: Google App Engine proxying different routes to different backend micro services.

With Cloudflare, a similar setup could look like this:

  • Cloud Functions: Cloudflare Workers
  • Queues: Cloudflare Queue
  • User interface: We are thinking about Qwik on Cloudflare Pages.
  • Authentication: We know Cloudflare Access but that’s not suitable for SaaS, I think.
  • API: Since we don’t have to expose an API anymore, this part may not be necessary. If that changes, a Worker could be used to expose a central API and proxy requests like GAE did before.

So my questions are:

  • Is there anything similar to Google’s IAP and Identity Platform, see here?
  • Our new software will require to process a lot of data. Since Cloudflare has huge internal data pipelines and uses ML, see here and here for example, we are curious if more (and if yes what) data-centric features are on the roadmap.
  • Is there any documentation on how to build more complex things on top of Cloudflare services? One thing we love about Cloudflare is that there are usually a lot of great examples for specific services to learn from, but we wouldn’t mind a more high-level example on how best to use Cloudflare’s various services together, if there is a certain recommended approach.
  • Is there a team at Cloudflare that startups that want to build on Cloudflare can reach out to?

Thanks in advance and have a great day!

p.s.: Cloudflare, do you intend to use the term Supercloud in the future? I haven’t seen it used widely yet.

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I’d be extra wary with vendor locking the entire platform you are building. With that in mind:

Workers Analytics Engine (beta) · Cloudflare Analytics docs might fit what you are looking for.
It’s beta and doesn’t have any pricing listed so… :person_shrugging:. Maybe you end up using it to find that the pricing isn’t great.

CF has a ton of compute power but the amount of resources you can use as part of the supercloud are sometimes limited. That might change in the next years.

Join the discord community, the team is quite active there and its likely to show interest on your product.

It’s a bit of a meme within the community but it seems like tech writers and stock people love to write about it, it’s likely to be mentioned more in the future.

Not that I know. There have been some community attempts but I wouldn’t trust authentication/authorization projects made as a hobby on a business project.

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