Cloudflare Inc. today launched a new service to help companies speed up their online services by deploying code in closer physical proximity to users.

The offering, which is called Cloudflare Workers, does so by harnessing the web optimization giant’s global network of 127 data centers. In a certain respect, this approach represents an evolution of the traditional content delivery network.

Cloudflare and other CDNs work by caching static website elements such as images in multiple data centers worldwide so that users can download them from a location near them. The shorter the distance information has to travel across the network, the faster it can be loaded. Cloudflare Workers extends this concept to the JavaScript code that powers dynamic website features such as location-based content personalization.

With the service, a company can deploy scripts in the Cloudflare data center closest to each user. Customers’ code is run on V8, the JavaScript engine that Google LLC ships with Chrome. Cloudflare engineer Kenton Varda wrote in a blog post that a typical script takes less than a millisecond to execute.

The provider claims that speed is just one of the benefits offered by the service. Another is the fact that hosting code on Cloudflare data centers allows dynamic website features to keep functioning even if a company’s backend infrastructure suffers an outage. Plus, it saves bandwidth for organizations by offloading traffic that would normally be directed toward their infrastructure.

Cloudflare Workers should be particularly handy for executing latency-sensitive tasks. Often, websites download JavaScript scripts onto user devices to save the delay of sending browser requests to the backend. According to Cloudflare, running the code at the edge of the network makes it possible speed up execution times without consuming too much bandwidth or device battery life.

The offering is the latest in a series that the company has introduced in recent quarters to expand the scope of its platform. Previously, Cloudflare introduced a secure access service aimed at making it more convenient for workers to log into systems that run behind their companies’ firewalls.

Cloudflare Workers is priced at 50 cents per million requests.  

Image: Cloudflare