In a recent blog post, Cloudflare announced a fast, secure, and free way to build and host JAMstack sites with Cloudflare Pages. It seamlessly integrates with a Git repository and existing JAMstack frameworks and is in beta now.
JAMStack, which stands for JavaScript, APIs, and pre-rendered Markup, is a popular way of developing and deploying websites at scale. The framework allows organizations to decouple the frontend from the backend of their website. A change to a website results in a prebuilt of the frontend, and pages are transformed into optimized static pages that can be hosted and cached on a global edge network. Moreover, JAMStack sites are not entirely static. Developers can use APIs from API-based services like Stripe - payment modules are loaded directly from Stripe's server when the page is rendered in a web browser.
With Cloudflare pages, developers will have the following benefits:
- Integration with GitHub repositories. When configuring a site is complete, a developer can preview each commit from Cloudflare's interface – each commit results in a unique URL, and a preview environment is available.
- Furthermore, developers can invite users to the Pages project allowing them to provide feedback. These users can add an unlimited number of collaborators for free to each project, making Pages ideal for every size team.
- The sites will have low latency as Cloudflare Pages run on Cloudflare's edge, spanning over 200 cities globally.
- Integration with Cloudflare Workers Platform allows developers to write their own APIs through direct integration with workers and access direct storage via Workers KV and Durable Objects.
- Support Cloudflare brings with the latest web standards HTTP/3, IPv6, TLS 1.3, and image compression out of the box.
With Cloudflare Pages, the company will directly compete with Netlify or Vercel, two cloud hosting companies that allow developers to build and deploy sites using JAMstack frameworks, which include Gatsby, Jekyll, Hugo, Vue.js, and Next.js. Furthermore, Cloudflare Pages offer a similar capability called 'Continuous Product Review' found in Netlify, Vercel, and Heroku with the preview environments.
A respondent on a Hacker News thread also commented on the similarities between Cloudflare Pages and Netlify:
It seems very similar to Netlify, which is a good thing. Commits get their own preview URLs, and branches get their own dedicated alias. I had a quick look at their pricing as well, and the main difference is the Cloudflare free plan is limited to 500 builds per month as opposed to Netlify's 300 build _minutes_ per month and that Cloudflare offers unlimited bandwidth instead of 100GB per month.
According to the Cloudflare press release, Cloudflare Pages offers exceptional security, scalability, pricing, and performance—up to twice as fast as other platforms. In the press release, Matthew Prince, co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare, said:
From day one, Cloudflare was built to service developers. Over the last ten years, millions of developers have counted on us for our network performance and security services. With Cloudflare Pages, we're now providing them with a scalable, fast, secure, cost-effective platform to build next-generation applications that they can deploy globally. Internally, we believe it's only a matter of time before an individual developer builds a billion-dollar company on their own. We hope Cloudflare Pages will provide the building blocks to help make our belief a reality.
More details on Cloudflare Pages are available on the documentation landing page. Furthermore, the beta is open for developers to try out.