Introducing Workers KV Instant — powered by Quicksilver

Today, we’re introducing Workers KV Instant, a new mode for Workers KV that pushes your changes globally for instant availability without cold read penalties.

Workers KV has been one of our most popular services on the Developer Platform since launching during Birthday Week in 2018. It’s great for quickly accessing data like static assets and user configuration that is written occasionally but read frequently. We use it ourselves across many Cloudflare products.

We also have another key-value store, Quicksilver, which we’ve blogged about many times since introducing it in 2020. We designed Quicksilver for incredibly fast global replication and low-latency access, and nearly every request to Cloudflare looks up at least one key in Quicksilver. People have asked us for years, but we’ve never made Quicksilver available to our customers.

We’re changing that today with Workers KV Instant. KV Instant mode provides the same API as Workers KV, but powers it using Quicksilver. KV Instant offers 100 times faster p99 reads and immediate updates, with no need to wait for a TTL to expire. It’s not for every type of data, but, for infrequently updated application configuration data — the same thing we use Quicksilver for ourselves — KV Instant shines. Continue reading

Build applications of any size on Cloudflare with the Queues open beta

Message queues are a fundamental building block of cloud applications—and today the Cloudflare Queues open beta brings queues to every developer building for Region: Earth. Cloudflare Queues follows Cloudflare Workers and Cloudflare R2 in a long line of innovative services built for the Workers Developer Platform, enabling developers to build more complex applications without configuring networks, choosing regions, or estimating capacity. Best of all, like many other Cloudflare services, there are no egregious egress charges!

If you’ve ever purchased something online and seen a message like “you will receive confirmation of your order shortly,” you’ve interacted with a queue. When you completed your order, your shopping cart and information were stored and the order was placed into a queue. At some later point, the order fulfillment service picks and packs your items and hands it off to the shipping service—again, via a queue. Your order may sit for only a minute, or much longer if an item is out of stock or a warehouse is busy, and queues enable all of this functionality.

Message queues are great at decoupling components of applications, like the checkout and order fulfillment services for an ecommerce site. Decoupled services are easier to reason about, Continue reading