Cloudflare Pages

Cloudflare Pages Review and Features

Written by Thom Krupa

Last update: 6/7/2024

FeatureCloudflare Pages

Infrastructure

What runs under-the-hood.

Cloudflare

Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Continuous deployment

Imagine an automatic update system for your website. This feature automatically deploys any changes you make to your code (usually from Git) to your live website.

Automated builds from Git

An easy integration with popular Git repository hostings like Github, GitLab and Bitbucket.

Instant rollbacks to any version

Easy way to promote any previous build to production without the need to revert commits or data changes.

Site previews for every push

New build with a unique URL for every commit and pull request.

Compatible with all Static Site Generators

Notifications

Events triggered on successful, canceled, or failed build.
Emails, pagerDuty, webhooks

Team Management

Create team account and invite your teammates to the project.

Custom domains

Bring your own domain and connect to the project.

Automatic HTTPS

SSL certificate generated automatically.

Rewrites & Redirects

HTTP 301 or 302 redirects from one URL to another. Rewrites work similar to reverse proxy and allow to send user to different URL without modifying the original URL.

Password Protection

An easy way to restrict access to the website for users who don't have password. Useful if you work on a new site and want to keep it in secret.

Skew Protection

Skew Protection ensures client and server versions stay synchronized during deployments, preventing compatibility issues.

Free Tier

Websites

Number of projects you can have in Free Tier on one account.

Unlimited

Build Minutes

The amount of time your build scripts can run per month.

500 builds* /month

*not minutes

Concurrent builds

How many builds can be run at the same time?

1

Bandwidth

The amount of data that is transferred to or from the CDN.

Unlimited

Team Members

The number of users (team members) that can be added to the CMS.

5

Build Time Per Deployment

Build have to finish within the limited time. If not it will fail due to timeout.

20 minutes

Build Memory Limit (in MiB)

The amount of memory that is allocated by system to build process. Some operations like image processing are expensive and might require more memory. For Node.js it is max-old-space-size setting.
N/A

Paid Plans

Max team members before switch to custom pricing

Unlimited

Git contributors have to be Team Members

In order to triger build, Git contributor has to be a paid team member.

Serverless

Serverless Functions (API)

Small pieces of code that run on-demand without managing servers, typically used for API endpoints.
JavaScript

Edge Functions

Serverless functions that run closer to the user, reducing latency and improving performance.
Cloudflare Workers

Background Functions

Code that runs in the background on the platform to perform tasks that don't require immediate user interaction.

CRON Jobs

Schedule tasks to run automatically at specific times or intervals. Useful for automating repetitive website maintenance tasks.

Developer Experience

CLI

Command Line Interface tools that allow developers to perform tasks and manage the tool via the command line.
wrangler

Extensions

Additional plugins or add-ons that can enhance the functionality of the platform.

Environment Variables

Secret configuration settings for your website that change based on where it's deployed (dev, staging, production).
N/A

Build Logs

Track the progress and results of website builds for troubleshooting

Build Canceling

Ability to stop a build process that is currently running. This frees up resources and lets you make changes to your website faster by stopping builds you don't need anymore.

Platform Built-in Products

Analytics

Tools for tracking and analyzing website traffic.
CDN-side and client-side

Authentication

Services for managing user logins and authentication.
Zero trust

Database

Managed database services.
Cloudflare D1

Asset Optimizations

Tools for optimizing images, CSS, JS, etc.
bundling, minifying, compressing images

A/B Testing

Lets you test different versions of your site by directing traffic to each variant, helping you optimize user experience based on performance metrics.

Form Handling

Services for managing form submissions.

Data Storage

Solutions for storing and managing data.
Cloudflare R2

Push Notifications

This allows your website to send real-time alerts or updates to visitors who have opted-in.

Machine Learning

Security & Compliance Offerings

Two-factor authentication

Adds an extra layer of security when logging in.

Team Logs

Tracks user activity within the platform for better accountability.

SOC2

Service Organization Control 2 compliance for managing customer data.

ISO27001

International standard for information security management.

GDPR

Compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation for handling personal data.

Sustainability

Carbon Neutral

Carbon-free Energy

Integrations

Integrations

Connecting your deployment platform with external services like headless content, commerce, databases, and more.

Custom build-system integrations

Allows you to connect your own build tools and processes with the deployment platform.
N/A

Support with self-hosted instances of git

API mesh

API Mesh allows you to combine multiple APIs into a single unified API, simplifying data fetching and integration across different services and backends.
N/A

Deploy Preview feedback integrations

Enables team members and stakeholders to comment directly on preview deployments.
N/A

Edge Functions integrations

High Performance Build Memory and CPU

N/A

Native Build Plugins

N/A

World-class CDN

Cloudflare is known best as an impressive and one of the fastest global content delivery networks (CDN). With more than 200 data centers around the world, Cloudflare CDN is one of the biggest free networks.

For years Cloudflare has been investing in the Internet, improving its security, offering a free CDN, DNS, DDoS attack mitigation, SSL, and many other products like Argo.

Cloudflare has spotted an opportunity in static site evolution. New products like Workers and Pages feel like a natural way of growing the Cloudflare product portfolio.

Zero cold start edge functions

A common issue of serverless functions like AWS Lambda is a cold start. The time that function needs to execute for the first time. Cloudflare Workers essentially run instantly, because of 0ms cold start, they can be used as an entry point for your website. That enables endless dynamic enhancements for static files.

HTMLRewrite class is a part of Workers Runtime API. Imagine a jQuery-like API to modify HTML response directly on the CDN with no server involved. Based on HTTP headers like Cookie, you can change content, styles, or scripts included on the page.

CI/CD with no user, sites, and bandwidth limits

Pages are the most recent Cloudflare product, and essentially it is a CI/CD. Connect Github repo, configure build script and automatically deploy a website.

Currently, it's a beta, and you can start for free with a quite generous plan: unlimited sites, users, and bandwidth.

Server-side analytics

Server-side analytics are based on CDN logs and are not affected by ad-blockers. It's a secure, privacy-friendly way of collecting essential data like unique requests. Bonus: all of it available through GraphQL Analytics API if you want to create a custom dashboard.

Conclusion

Cloudflare Pages is one of the most interesting solutions for Jamstack projects. Thanks to Workers, you can run JS straight on the Edge, modify HTML response, or use it for auth. Pages are still in beta and quite new. So it might be a perfect moment to test it out on your personal projects and gradually introduce it to your company.

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