Posted by max_lt 9 hours ago
OpenWorkers lets you run untrusted JS in V8 isolates on your own infrastructure. Same DX as Cloudflare Workers, no vendor lock-in.
What works today: fetch, KV, Postgres bindings, S3/R2, cron scheduling, crypto.subtle.
Self-hosting is a single docker-compose file + Postgres.
Would love feedback on the architecture and what feature you'd want next.
I'm quite ignorant on the topic (as I never saw the appeal of Cloudflare workers, not due to technical problems but solely because of centralization) but what does DX in "goal has always been the same: run JavaScript on your own servers, with the same DX as Cloudflare Workers but without vendor lock-in." mean? Looks like a runtime or environment but looking at https://github.com/drzo/workerd I also don't see it.
Anyway if the "DX" is a kind of runtime, in which actual contexts is it better than the incumbents, e.g. Node, or the newer ones e.g. Deno or Zig or even more broadly WASI?
I'm not the blogger, I'm just a developer who works professionally with Cloudflare Workers. To me the main value proposition is avoiding vendor lock-in, and even so the logic doesn't seem to be there.
The main value proposition of Cloudflare Workers is being able to deploy workers at the edge and use them to implement edge use cases. Meaning, custom cache logic, perhaps some pauthorization work, request transformation and aggregation, etc. If you remove the global edge network and cache, you do not have any compelling reason to look at this.
It's also perplexing how the sales pitch is Rust+WASM. This completely defeats the whole purpose of Cloudflare Workers. The whole point of using workers is to have very fast isolates handling IO-heavy workloads where they stay idling the majority of the time so that the same isolate instance can handle a high volume of requests. WASM is notorious for eliminating the ability to yield on awaits from fetch calls, and is only compelling if your argument is a lift-and-shift usecase. Which this ain't it.