Content delivery network (CDN) and infrastructure Cloudflare, has launched a serverless database running on its Workers API.

D1 is intended to provide instant database services for developers, without requiring them to install a full database. It will store data close to users on the Cloudflare CDN, and is intended for uses including phone apps and enterprise SaaS applicatsion.

The system will be accessed by SQL.

Database without the database

“The hardest part about serverless isn’t actually the code, it’s the storage. Today we’re announcing our first serverless database which we expect will quickly become one of the largest databases in the world,"  said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. "Cloudflare D1 is built on Cloudflare’s global network, which we believe will allow us to offer one of the largest and most performant serverless databases on the market so no business needs to be bogged down by the cost and complexity of  managing their storage." 

Distributing the database at the Edge on Cloudflare’s network should give a faster response time, and placing it on a serverless compute platform will make things easier for developers to build full-stack applications without having to manage the underlying layers. Cloudflare D1 will be compatible with the popular SQLite API. 

Content delivery networks, originally created to speed Internet pages to users. have become a more important part of infrastructure with the rise of Edge computing, which requires data to be located closer to users for speedy response times. CDN players Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly are all making efforts to build their products' role in this world. Last year CloudFlare launched a storage service to rival AWS' S3.

However, as applications are spread onto CDNs, this can increase unknown weaknesses and reliances on single points of failure. In recent years, Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly have all suffered major outages, which have raised alarms about the process.