[[CloudFlare]] feature for SaaS products with an API to allow its customers to run server-side code on the CloudFlare platform. > I like to call it Functions as a Service as a Service. It allows any SaaS service to make itself programmable. It's a bit tricky to understand so let me explain with some examples. > Say you are the developer of basically any SaaS app that has an API, especially an event-driven one (e.g. with webhooks). You want your users to use your API to customize your service. > Now there's a problem: To use your API and respond to events, your user has to run a server. Even for the kind of tech-savvy user that can write code, that's still a relatively high bar for most. So not many people use your API. > What you really want is to let people upload code direct to your service, and you run it for them. But running code on behalf of large numbers of small users, securely and efficiently, is a hard problem, and not your core business. > Enter Cloudflare Workers. We've solved exactly this problem. We can efficiently run a piece of code whether it executes twice a day or a million times a second. Now we've built a product that lets you give us your users' code to run efficiently, too. > The idea here is your user doesn't know that Workers is involved, they are just uploading code to you, and you pass it to Cloudflare to run on demand. But now your user doesn't have to set up their own server. > As an added bonus, your user's code doesn't need to deal with API keys or verifying signatures or whatnot. They just make function calls and everything is already authenticated. > I'm excited to see a future of SaaS apps that are much more programmable. I personally want to shove a little JavaScript into every app I use... but I don't want to maintain a server or juggle API keys to do it! --- ## References - [Tweet thread introducing it](https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1524033314448891905) - https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-for-platforms/