A global virtual private cloud for building secure cross-cloud apps on Cloudflare Workers

Today, we’re sharing a preview of a new feature that makes it easier to build cross-cloud apps: Workers VPC. 

Workers VPC is our take on the traditional virtual private cloud (VPC), modernized for a network and compute that isn’t tied to a single cloud region. And we’re complementing it with Workers VPC Private Links to make building across clouds easier. Together, they introduce two new capabilities to Workers:

1. A way to group your apps’ resources on Cloudflare into isolated environments, where only resources within a Workers VPC can access one another, allowing you to secure and segment app-to-app traffic (a “Workers VPC”).

2. A way to connect a Workers VPC to a legacy VPC in a public or private cloud, enabling your Cloudflare resources to access your resources in private networks and vice versa, as if they were in a single VPC (the “Workers VPC Private Link”).

^{Workers VPC and Workers VPC Private Link enable bidirectional connectivity between Cloudflare and external clouds}

When linked to an external VPC, Workers VPC makes the underlying resources directly addressable, so that application developers can think at the application layer, without dropping down to the network layer. Think of this like a Continue reading

Build global MySQL apps using Cloudflare Workers and Hyperdrive

Today, we’re announcing support for MySQL in Cloudflare Workers and Hyperdrive. You can now build applications on Workers that connect to your MySQL databases directly, no matter where they’re hosted, with native MySQL drivers, and with optimal performance. 

Connecting to MySQL databases from Workers has been an area we’ve been focusing on for quite some time. We want you to build your apps on Workers with your existing data, even if that data exists in a SQL database in us-east-1. But connecting to traditional SQL databases from Workers has been challenging: it requires making stateful connections to regional databases with drivers that haven’t been designed for the Workers runtime. 

After multiple attempts at solving this problem for Postgres, Hyperdrive emerged as our solution that provides the best of both worlds: it supports existing database drivers and libraries while also providing best-in-class performance. And it’s such a critical part of connecting to databases from Workers that we’re making it free (check out the Hyperdrive free tier announcement).

With new Node.js compatibility improvements and Hyperdrive support for the MySQL wire protocol, we’re happy to say MySQL support for Cloudflare Workers has been achieved. If you want to Continue reading

We made Workers KV up to 3x faster — here’s the data

Speed is a critical factor that dictates Internet behavior. Every additional millisecond a user spends waiting for your web page to load results in them abandoning your website. The old adage remains as true as ever: faster websites result in higher conversion rates. And with such outcomes tied to Internet speed, we believe a faster Internet is a better Internet.

Customers often use Workers KV to provide Workers with key-value data for configuration, routing, personalization, experimentation, or serving assets. Many of Cloudflare’s own products rely on KV for just this purpose: Pages stores static assets, Access stores authentication credentials, AI Gateway stores routing configuration, and Images stores configuration and assets, among others. So KV’s speed affects the latency of every request to an application, throughout the entire lifecycle of a user session. 

Today, we’re announcing up to 3x faster KV hot reads, with all KV operations faster by up to 20ms. And we want to pull back the curtain and show you how we did it. 

^{Workers KV read latency (ms) by percentile measured from Pages}

Optimizing Workers KV’s architecture to minimize latency

At a high level, Workers KV is itself a Worker that makes requests to central Continue reading