R2 SQL: a deep dive into our new distributed query engine

How do you run SQL queries over petabytes of data… without a server?

We have an answer for that: R2 SQL, a serverless query engine that can sift through enormous datasets and return results in seconds.

This post details the architecture and techniques that make this possible. We'll walk through our Query Planner, which uses R2 Data Catalog to prune terabytes of data before reading a single byte, and explain how we distribute the work across Cloudflare’s global network, Workers and R2 for massively parallel execution.

During Developer Week 2025, we launched R2 Data Catalog, a managed Apache Iceberg catalog built directly into your Cloudflare R2 bucket. Iceberg is an open table format that provides critical database features like transactions and schema evolution for petabyte-scale object storage. It gives you a reliable catalog of your data, but it doesn’t provide a way to query it.

Until now, reading your R2 Data Catalog required setting up a separate service like Apache Spark or Trino. Operating these engines at scale is not easy: you need to provision clusters, manage resource usage, and be responsible for their availability, none of which contributes to the primary goal of Continue reading

Automatic Platform Optimization post-launch report

Last year during Birthday Week, we announced Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress (APO): smart HTML caching for WordPress sites using Cloudflare. Initial testing across various WordPress sites demonstrated significant improvements in performance metrics like Time to First Byte (TTFB), First Contentful Paint (FCP), and Speed Index. We wanted to measure how APO impacted web performance for our customers since the launch.

In the blog post, we answer the following questions:

• How fast is Automatic Platform Optimization? Can you demonstrate it with data?

We will show real-world improvements for several performance metrics.

• Is Automatic Platform Optimization flexible enough to integrate smoothly with my WordPress site?

We have added and improved lots of features since the initial launch.

• Will Automatic Platform Optimization work when used with other plugins?

We will cover the most common use cases and explain how Automatic Platform Optimization could be fined-tuned.

Measuring performance with WebPageTest

We use WebPageTest as a go-to tool for synthetic testing at Cloudflare. It measures web performance metrics in real browsers, is highly programmable, and could scale to test millions of sites per day. Among the benefits of synthetic testing are easy to produce results and their relatively high reproducibility.

Automatic Platform Optimization Continue reading

Building Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress using Cloudflare Workers

This post explains how we implemented the Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress. In doing so, we have defined a new place to run WordPress plugins, at the edge written with Cloudflare Workers. We provide the feature as a Cloudflare service but what’s exciting is that anyone could build this using the Workers platform.

The service is an evolution of the ideas explained in an earlier zero-config edge caching of HTML blog post. The post will explain how Automatic Platform Optimization combines the best qualities of the regular Cloudflare cache with Workers KV to improve cache cold starts globally.

The optimization will work both with and without the Cloudflare for WordPress plugin integration. Not only have we provided a zero config edge HTML caching solution but by using the Workers platform we were also able to improve the performance of Google font loading for all pages.

We are launching the feature first for WordPress specifically but the concept can be applied to any website and/or content management system (CMS).

A new place to run WordPress plugins?

There are many individual WordPress plugins for performance that use similar optimizations to existing Cloudflare services. Automatic Platform Optimization is bringing them all together into Continue reading