Cloudflare Workers and Containers now support inbound TCP connections and gRPC

AI is changing how people interact with computers, and voice is becoming an increasingly important part of that shift. Real-time assistants, AI-powered dictation, and other voice interfaces need low-latency communication between clients, models, and supporting services. Many developers use gRPC, a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework built on HTTP/2 and TCP, for this infrastructure.

Ever since Workers launched in 2017, we’ve been expanding their capabilities, including adding the ability to open outbound TCP connections and a JavaScript-native RPC system built on Cap’n Proto. And so as part of Agents Week, we’re extending Workers in the other direction, supporting inbound TCP connections and adding new ways to run gRPC applications on Cloudflare.

Today, we’re announcing:

• connect(socket) — a new handler in the Workers runtime that lets your Worker directly accept an inbound TCP socket provided by Spectrum (Cloudflare’s ingress proxy for non-HTTP traffic)
• Full-duplex, bi-directional gRPC from Cloudflare Containers — forward the socket from your Worker to your gRPC server running in a container
• Workers can serve unary and server-streaming gRPC APIs and call gRPC servers — you write your code using gRPC-web, and Cloudflare automatically converts incoming and outgoing requests to gRPC

We’re introducing this in private beta — Continue reading