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Elephants in tunnels: how Hyperdrive connects to databases inside your VPC networks

With September’s announcement of Hyperdrive’s ability to send database traffic from Workers over Cloudflare Tunnels, we wanted to dive into the details of what it took to make this happen.

Accessing your data from anywhere in Region Earth can be hard. Traditional databases are powerful, familiar, and feature-rich, but your users can be thousands of miles away from your database. This can cause slower connection startup times, slower queries, and connection exhaustion as everything takes longer to accomplish.

Cloudflare Workers is an incredibly lightweight runtime, which enables our customers to deploy their applications globally by default and renders the cold start problem almost irrelevant. The trade-off for these light, ephemeral execution contexts is the lack of persistence for things like database connections. Database connections are also notoriously expensive to spin up, with many round trips required between client and server before any query or result bytes can be exchanged.

Hyperdrive is designed to make the centralized databases you already have feel like they’re global while keeping connections to those databases hot. We use our global network to get faster routes to your database, keep connection pools primed, and cache your most frequently run queries as close to users Continue reading

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Supporting Postgres Named Prepared Statements in Hyperdrive

Hyperdrive (Cloudflare’s globally distributed SQL connection pooler and cache) recently added support for Postgres protocol-level named prepared statements across pooled connections. Named prepared statements allow Postgres to cache query execution plans, providing potentially substantial performance improvements. Further, many popular drivers in the ecosystem use these by default, meaning that not having them is a bit of a footgun for developers. We are very excited that Hyperdrive’s users will now have access to better performance and a more seamless development experience, without needing to make any significant changes to their applications!

While we're not the first connection pooler to add this support (PgBouncer got to it in October 2023 in version 1.21, for example), there were some unique challenges in how we implemented it. To that end, we wanted to do a deep dive on what it took for us to deliver this.

Hyper-what?

One of the classic problems of building on the web is that your users are everywhere, but your database tends to be in one spot.  Combine that with pesky limitations like network routing, or the speed of light, and you can often run into situations where your users feel the pain of having your Continue reading