Workers review

Workers changed how I build software. The isolate model means effectively zero cold starts, code runs in hundreds of cities without you thinking about regions, and the pricing is far cheaper than traditional serverless. The reason is simple: you are billed for CPU time, not wall-clock time. Most serverless platforms charge for every millisecond your function exists, including the time it spends idle waiting on a database or an API call. Workers only charges while your code is actually doing work, so all that waiting costs nothing.

The developer experience is generally good rather than excellent. Wrangler is fine, local development with workerd has come a long way and now closely matches production, and static asset hosting lets a Worker serve a complete website rather than only an API. There are rough edges. They just aren’t enough to cost Workers the 10.

A decade in, entire production platforms run on Workers: routing, APIs, websites, and background jobs. Limits on CPU time and bundle size have risen repeatedly. My enthusiasm has grown with scale. The caveats belong to products around Workers, not Workers itself.