What’s New for Developers: January 2022

EdgeWorkers IDE extensions (VSCode and IntelliJ)

In October 2021, new extensions for Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ integrated development environments (IDEs) were released for EdgeWorkers. The Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDEs each include a built-in extension for EdgeWorkers. These IDE extensions were designed to improve developer productivity and enhance the EdgeWorkers development process.

➡️  For instructions about how to install these add-ons and for additional configuration and usage details, refer to the getting started guides:

• Getting started guide for EdgeWorkers VSCode Extension

• Getting started guide for EdgeWorkers IntelliJ Extension

Unit testing for EdgeWorkers

Unit testing for EdgeWorkers is now available. Unit testing can help with finding bugs. Finding and fixing bugs early in the development cycle will improve the quality of code and make the testing phase easier — and reduce the risk of regression.

➡️  Read the tech docs page : https://techdocs.akamai.com/edgeworkers/docs/unit-testing-for-edgeworkers

DataStream support for EdgeWorkers

We are excited to announce that, as of December, DataStream now includes support for EdgeWorkers. DataStream is a reporting service that provides nearly real-time logs that contain details about EdgeWorkers usage and execution.

➡️  To learn more about DataStream support for EdgeWorkers, please refer to the guide

Retry capability included in the EdgeKV JavaScript helper library

The EdgeKV JavaScript helper library (version 0.5.0) now includes a retry capability. The num_retries_on_timeout parameter lets you specify the maximum number of retries to attempt when executing the getText() and getJson() methods. You can also specify the number of retries to attempt in the Constructor.

On cold hits, where a value is not present in the edge cache, EdgeKV GET requests may exceed the EdgeWorkers sub-request timeout limits. EdgeWorkers event execution can fail if the timeout is not explicitly handled in the JavaScript code. This can also be problematic in a production environment where the EdgeWorkers function executes in geographies outside the configured namespace geolocation.

To help prevent a GET request from failing, you can include the retry capability. A retry is more likely to succeed instead of timing out because there is a chance that the data has already reached the local server. This increases the success rate of EdgeWorkers event executions for EdgeKV cold hit access but comes at the expense of additional latency when retries are executed.

Please note that each retry request is a separate, billable READ request. You can specify the num_retries_on_timeout parameter as a value in the EdgeKV Constructor, or each time getText() or getJson() is invoked. For more information about the num_retries_on_timeout parameter, refer to library helper methods in the EdgeKV documentation.

EdgeKV support for new geolocations

Developers using the EdgeKV API can now use the geoLocation parameter to specify the storage location for data when creating a namespace on the production network. This can help optimize performance by storing data where most or all of your users are located. By default, the geoLocation is set to US (United States). The available geolocations on the production network also include EU (Europe) and JP (Japan). For more information, see the Namespace section in the EdgeKV data model documentation.