| I think the easiest way to explain is this: Think of any SaaS app that has webhooks to notify users of events, and an API for automations to respond to those events. For example: * Chat service -> Chat bots * Forums -> Moderator bots * Spreadsheet editor -> User scripts to perform complex calculations when a cell changes * Payments service -> Hook to send an invoice upon a successful monthly payment Today, for a user to receive those webhooks, they have to run a server somewhere. Maybe on Digital Ocean or the like. That's easy if the user is itself a SaaS service, but it's a high hurdle for many other users. Imagine instead that they could just upload JavaScript directly to the SaaS service, and it'd be run by the service in place of sending a webhook. But most SaaS app developers don't want to be in the business of trying to run code on behalf of their users. Security and efficiency are both pretty difficult to get right. Workers for Platforms lets the SaaS developer leverage Cloudflare Workers to do this. Cloudflare understands how to run arbitrary code security and efficiently. So now, the SaaS developer can offer their users the ability to upload code snippets to automate events. (Disclosure: I'm the tech lead of Cloudflare Workers, and I'm personally very excited about this product!) |
[1] https://www.svix.com