Cloudflare disclosed that EmDash Version 1.0 is coming soon. EmDash is Cloudflare’s modern content management system that is designed to be immune to the kinds of vulnerabilities and performance bottlenecks that have plagued WordPress for decades.
Why Version 1.0 Is A Big Deal
A 1.0 release is a big deal because it generally means that the software has progressed from a testing phase to condition where it’s trustworthy and ready to deploy in the real world.
When EmDash was launched it was described as version “0.1.0 preview” and as an “early developer beta” which meant it was not yet ready to be deployed on a production site.
That’s coming to an end soon. Cloudflare announced that it has successfully migrated their blog to EmDash.
EmDash – The Spiritual Successor To WordPress
EmDash launched on April 1st, proclaiming itself as the spiritual successor to WordPress, a claim that provoked a strong reaction from WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. At launch, EmDash was nowhere near any kind of successor to WordPress or any other mature content management system because it was still in developer preview and not yet ready for production sites.
Cloudflare’s initial announcement explained:
“WordPress powers over 40% of the Internet. It is a massive success that has enabled anyone to be a publisher, and created a global community of WordPress developers. But the WordPress open source project will be 24 years old this year. Hosting a website has changed dramatically during that time. When WordPress was born, AWS EC2 didn’t exist. In the intervening years, that task has gone from renting virtual private servers, to uploading a JavaScript bundle to a globally distributed network at virtually no cost. It’s time to upgrade the most popular CMS on the Internet to take advantage of this change.
Our name for this new CMS is EmDash. We think of it as the spiritual successor to WordPress. It’s written entirely in TypeScript. It is serverless, but you can run it on your own hardware or any platform you choose. Plugins are securely sandboxed and can run in their own isolate, via Dynamic Workers, solving the fundamental security problem with the WordPress plugin architecture. And under the hood, EmDash is powered by Astro, the fastest web framework for content-driven websites.”
That may change very soon as Cloudflare recently hinted that version 1 was imminent.
Screenshot Of EmDash Perfect CWV Score
Cloudflare’s Successful Deployment Of EmDash
Cloudflare posted an article to their blog that detailed the blogs migration to EmDash. The migration happened in stages, ending in a full rollout on August 12th. This is a milestone event because it demonstrates that Cloudflare trusts EmDash in a live production environment.
The main concern for Cloudflare was whether the blog could scale and rolling it out to their blog was the test that would show whether or not it can work.
Cloudflare explained:
“Our biggest concerns were whether our proposed EmDash setup could handle the traffic we saw on the Cloudflare Blog.
The traffic pattern to our blog is incredibly varied. Normal load sits in the neighborhood of 75 requests per second (RPS), but also spikes up to over 5,000 RPS. Some of these spikes line up with the publishing times of new posts, meaning those posts went viral and attracted a lot of attention. Others happen during all points of the day and night, which likely means folks are sending some extra traffic our way, just to see what happens.
Performance also matters for our systems (and our readers). Cloudflare is a web performance company, after all, so the speed at which a page loads becomes incredibly important.
… Ensuring zero downtime for our readers was a non-negotiable requirement, alongside guaranteeing a seamless fallback mechanism if something went wrong at the last minute.”
Their first test, during Agents Week in the beginning of August went well, serving as many as 450 RPS (request for pages per second) and was able to manage a 28,000 RPS DDoS attack.
They admit to discovering there were still some issues on the editing side that needed fixing. The biggest issue was around post scheduling, an issue they expect to be resolved soon.
Version 1 Rolling Out Soon
The article ended with a word of thanks to the team working behind the scenes to make EmDash happen and to announce that version 1.0 is coming soon.
Cloudflare wrote:
“We want to give a heartfelt thank you to the EmDash team, who made this migration about as smooth as possible and were incredibly receptive to our feedback. This is how Customer Zero is supposed to work, and it’s incredibly gratifying to share an inside look into that process with all of our readers as well.
If you’re in the market for a new CMS, try out EmDash today. It’s pretty amazing and – with the upcoming launch to v1 – it’ll be getting even better soon.”
The upcoming 1.0 release is an important milestone that moves their spiritual successor to WordPress toward a more mature CMS that Cloudflare has now tested on its own high-traffic blog under real-world conditions.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Erlin Diah
