April 2020 Release

This next release of EdgeWorkers uniquely combines the power of Serverless functions and the Akamai Edge; the April release adds powerful features to improve cached delivery and offload, as well as other features to ensure fast and accurate coding from design to production.

New CDN Integration

• Change URL and Origin Support.  You can now modify both the path and query arguments for a request, and determine which origin the request should be directed to. Combined, these features provide unique opportunities to change the user experience including: device personalization without redirects, image optimization for device and browser, origin load balancing, A/B testing using cached content, and controlled rollout of new applications.

For more details see the User Guide>Development>JavaScript Object reference>Request Object>Methods for the Request Object>route(destination)

• Control Cache Keys.  To optimize cached delivery, you can now programmatically define cache keys. Cache keys are used to determine unique cached content; typically a combination of the URL, query arguments, cookies, headers, or custom variables. Optimizing keys ensures the correct cached content is delivered, and improves offload and performance. A simple example is removing specific query arguments from the cache keys, so that random debug values don’t bust caching in production. Another example is modifying the key to leverage A/B testing cookies, ensuring A or B variant of cached content is delivered for the same URL.

For more details see the User Guide>Development>JavaScript Object reference>cacheKey Object

Improvements to the Developer Workflow

• TypeScript Bindings.  We’ve published TypeScript bindings to the EdgeWorkers JavaScript API. TypeScript provides useful IDE integrations for faster and more accurate coding, preventing bugs found late in the release cycle.

See this blog post for more information.

• Failover Integration.  The new failover integration enables you to provide an alternative action when an EdgeWorker function fails (for whatever reason). You can specify content to be served in place of the error status code as a redirect or new request (even to another origin).

See the User Guide for more details.

• Sandbox Integration.  To help developers deploy and test code changes with Akamai-in-the-middle, without impacting other teams, Akamai Sandbox integration enables fast testing.

For more details see the User Guide>Test EdgeWorkers with the Sandbox CLI

Fixes

• Timeout Issues: We’ve modified the timeouts to avoid failures on first use due to code bundles taking too long to download and compile

We’re excited to announce the expansion of EdgeWorkers to Akamai’s enhanced secure network. You can now run edge functions everywhere on the network. Other notable changes include our new EdgeWorkers Management application and the Command Line Interface (CLI).

Note: If you have EdgeWorker functions deployed under the Tech Preview, there are changes below which will require a code update. Future releases will not force immediate code changes.

New:

• You can now perform the administrative tasks required to execute EdgeWorkers functions with the EdgeWorkers Management application user interface (UI).
• The EdgeWorkers CLI is now available to help automate and simplify your workflow.
• Trace response headers are now available to debug code on the network.
• The Cookies and URLSearchParams modules are available to access and modify query parameters.
• JavaScript modules can now be combined in the“main.js” file, allowing you to include useful libraries or align code to different teams.

Updates:

• The “main.js” file is now a module, enabled in strict mode by default. The four event functions now require the “export” keyword.
• The Request and Response Object methods have been removed from the new Cookies module.
• The Response constructor has been removed.
• The userLocation object now includes zipcode and city.
• onOriginRequest() and onClientResponse() cannot be used to create responses.
• When creating a deny response, you can provide the reason using the Reason ID.
• EdgeWorkers is now enabled across Akamai’s enhanced secure network. You no longer need the custom map to limit your traffic to a specific edge machine.