Why a Cloudflare Serverless Worker should be a martech devs best friend and what has ants got to do with it? you might ask

If you ask me, I'm going to say ... FAST, SMALL & VERY VERY VERY SCALABLE.

The purpose of this post is to provide:

1. Brief introduction to Cloudflare serverless workers and Q&A.
2. Simple example for how to make a QR code generator.
3. List of digital marketing use cases.

Brief introduction and Q&A

So what is a Cloudflare serverless worker you might ask? the quick answer is that it is just a function on a server that is managed for you.

For the official pitch and docs have a read of Cloudflare Serverless Workers.

Cloudflare Workers®

Build your next application with Cloudflare Workers

Workers logo

🧐 Q&A about Cloudflare Serverless Workers

Feel very welcome to put your questions in the comments.

OK, are they just for tech geeky people? no, read the answer to the next question.

Why are Cloudflare Serverless Workers so interesting? whilst they are highly scalable and very very very fast, they are inexpensive and you only pay for what you use, so that means that Cloudflare Serless Workers will be of interest to all sorts of people.

Do Clourflare Server Workers scale for enterprise requirements? Yes, Shopify has embraced Cloudflare Serverless Workers in a big way.

Shopify

Shopify + Cloudflare: Powering 1,000,000 storefronts on the biggest shopping weekend of the year

Cloudflare

Do you need to learn any special code? JavaScript is supported, so if you're one of the 65% of developers coding in JavaScript then you're covered.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022

In May 2022 over 70,000 developers told us how they learn and level up, which tools they’re using, and what they want.

Stack Overflow

But what if I'm one of the other 35% you might say! if you're one of the 35% of other developers not coding in JavaScript then there is Wasm (WebAssembly) support for C, C++, Rust, Cobol plus others, for more info read the announcement.

What can I do with a Cloudflare Serverless Worker? to learn more about use cases have a read of the official Cloudflare examples, and of course checkout the list of digital marketing use cases.

Examples · Cloudflare Workers docs

Documentation for Cloudflare Workers, a serverless execution environment that allows you to create entirely new applications or augment existing ones without configuring or maintaining infrastructure.

Examples · Cloudflare Workers docs

Are Cloudflare serverless workers the same as AWS Serverless Lambda functions? no, a  Cloudflare serverless worker is by design a very small script size, whereas an AWS Serverless Lambda function can contain magnitudes of code.

How to make QR code generator

Follow along with this tutorial.

Build a QR code generator · Cloudflare Workers docs

Documentation for Cloudflare Workers, a serverless execution environment that allows you to create entirely new applications or augment existing ones without configuring or maintaining infrastructure.

Build a QR code generator · Cloudflare Workers docs

You can either use the Wrangler deploy or copy the compiled code into a serverless worker created with the UI.

Then for me to get this to work I make a postman call like so to the serverless worker URL.

Digital marketing use cases

1. API Router - use the worker to act as a middleware between services.
2. Orchestrate API request caching - for example, make a request to an API service and the cache the result using Cloudflare's cache so that subsequent calls don't have a cost on the origin.
3. Anywhere where private keys are used - use a Cloudflare serverless worker for where private environment variables need to be hidden.
4. Custom URL and specific country redirects.
5. Custom URL shortner.
6. Logging.