dashflare: The edge is tomorrow

These slides were used in a presentation as part of trivago Tech Week 2020, a virtual event being hosted to promote knowledge exchange and a culture of tech excellence within trivago.
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How we built a privacy-focused analytics solution using the new possibilities offered by edge computing. The concrete implementation discussed here uses Cloudflare's Edge Workers but the principles are translatable to any other major CDN.

Code: https://github.com/jorgelbg/dashflare

Transcript

1. Jorge Luis Betancourt / Performance Team dashflare: The edge is tomorrow
3. EDGE COMPUTING Edge computing is a networking philosophy focused on bringing computing as close to the source of data as possible in order to reduce latency and bandwidth use.
4. EDGE COMPUTING Edge computing is a networking philosophy focused on bringing computing as close to the source of data user as possible in order to reduce latency and bandwidth use.
5. CDN content delivery network https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/what-is-a-cdn/ Edge Nodes
6. EDGE WORKERS Edge Workers provides a serverless execution environment that allows you to create entirely new applications or augment existing ones without configuring or maintaining infrastructure.
8. CDN content delivery network https://www.flaticon.com/authors/kiranshastry
10. Request Response Edge Worker
11. WHAT CAN WE DO?
12. Return a complete HTML page as a response
13. Modify the response from the origin https://bit.ly/cfworkers-examples
14. https://endler.dev/ https://jorgelbg.me ✅ Written in markdown ✅ Static HTML webpage ✅ Hosted in Github Pages
15. NO LOGS
17. Request Response logs/event collection for analytics purposes. • Geolocation information • Referrer analysis • User agent segmentation • User sessions (without collecting any personal information) https://www.flaticon.com/authors/pixel-perfect https://www.flaticon.com/authors/srip Origin
18. Interface / UI? Storage? • Cheap storage • Self hosted • GCS/S3 backend • LogQL (PromQL like query language) • Proven UI • Used by both of us (and more) • Out of the box support for Loki (query highlighting & other nice whistles).
20. CPU Time Historical CPU time consumed by dashflare upon execution.
21. DEVELOPER UX
22. CLI tool to interact with your Cloudflare Workers (wrangler) Local development environment with wrangler Supports console.log Statements
23. Realtime logs from production with wrangler tail ⚠️ https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/examples/debugging-logs
24. Preview deployment of your code wrangler preview https://blog.cloudflare.com/better-workers-debugging-with-a-network-panel/
25. Automatic fallback to the origin event.passThroughOnException()
26. https://github.com/cloudflare/worker-typescript-template https://github.com/cloudflare/worker-template https://github.com/cloudflare/rustwasm-worker-template
30. Host a static website & API A/B Tests (aka CTests) Custom routing/caching Logging Intercept & modify any Request / Response Analytics Security
31. TO USE THE EDGE