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