Network performance update: Developer Week 2025

As the Internet has become enmeshed in our everyday lives, so has our need for speed. No one wants to wait when adding shoes to our shopping carts, or accessing corporate assets from across the globe. And as the Internet supports more and more of our critical infrastructure, speed becomes more than just a measure of how quickly we can place a takeout order. It becomes the connective tissue between the systems that keep us safe, healthy, and organized. Governments, financial institutions, healthcare ecosystems, transit — they increasingly rely on the Internet. This is why at Cloudflare, building the fastest network is our north star. 

We’re happy to announce that we are the fastest network in 48% of the top 1000 networks by 95th percentile TCP connection time between November 2024, and March 2025, up from 44% in September 2024.

In this post, we’re going to share with you how our network performance has changed since our last post in September 2024, and talk about what makes us faster than other networks.  But first, let’s talk a little bit about how we get this data.

How does Cloudflare get this data?

It’s happened to all of us Continue reading

Introducing Workers Observability: logs, metrics, and queries – all in one place

We’re excited to announce Workers Observability – a new section in the Cloudflare Dashboard that allows you to query detailed log events across all Workers in your account to extract deeper insights.

In 2024, we set out to build the best first-party observability for any cloud platform. Since then, we’ve improved metrics reporting for all resources, launched Workers Logs to automatically ingest and store logs for Workers, and rebuilt real-time logs with improved filtering. However, observability insights have been limited to a single Worker.

Starting today, you can use Workers Observability to understand what is happening across all of your Workers:

  • Workers Metrics Dashboard (Beta): A single dashboard to view metrics and logs from all of your Workers 

  • Query Builder (Beta): Construct structured queries to explore your logs, extract metrics from logs, create graphical and tabular visualizations, and save queries for faster future investigations.

  • Workers Logs: Now Generally Available, with a public API and improved invocation-based grouping.

Building queries 

The Query Builder allows you to interact with your logs, and answer the “why” to any question you have. You can find it by navigating to Workers & Pages > Observability in the dashboard.

Using the Query Builder, you Continue reading

Cisco Champion 8th year in a row

Just got the news—I’ve been selected as a Cisco Champion for the 8th year in a row! Truly honored and thankful to be part of such an inspiring community. This year is full of milestones. While Cisco celebrates its 40th birthday, I’m marking 10 years as a CCIE and 15 years from my CCNA—a journey that’s brought endless learning, challenges, and growth throughout my career. Being a Cisco Champion year after year has been a great way to stay connected with amazing people, share knowledge, and keep up with the ever-evolving tech world. Here’s to Cisco’s 40 years of networking—and

The post Cisco Champion 8th year in a row appeared first on How Does Internet Work.

UALink Fires First GPU Interconnect Salvo At Nvidia NVSwitch

Compute engine makers can do all they want to bring the performance of their devices on par or even reasonably close to that of Nvidia’s various GPU accelerators, but until they have something akin to the NVLink and NVSwitch memory fabric that Nvidia uses to leverage the performance of many GPUs at bandwidths that dwarf PCI-Express switches and latencies that  dwarf Ethernet interconnects, they can never catch up. …

UALink Fires First GPU Interconnect Salvo At Nvidia NVSwitch was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Your frontend, backend, and database — now in one Cloudflare Worker

In September 2024, we introduced beta support for hosting, storing, and serving static assets for free on Cloudflare Workers — something that was previously only possible on Cloudflare Pages. Being able to host these assets — your client-side JavaScript, HTML, CSS, fonts, and images — was a critical missing piece for developers looking to build a full-stack application within a single Worker. 

Today we’re announcing ten big improvements to building apps on Cloudflare. All together, these new additions allow you to build and host projects ranging from simple static sites to full-stack applications, all on Cloudflare Workers:

Deploy your Next.js app to Cloudflare Workers with the Cloudflare adapter for OpenNext

We first announced the Cloudflare adapter for OpenNext at Builder Day 2024. It transforms Next.js applications to enable them to run on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.

Over the seven months since that September announcement, we have been working hard to improve the adapter. It is now more tightly integrated with OpenNext to enable supporting many more Next.js features. We kept improving the Node.js compatibility of Workers and unenv was also improved to polyfill the Node.js features not yet implemented by the runtime.

With all of this work, we are proud to announce the 1.0.0-beta release of @opennextjs/cloudflare. Using the Cloudflare adapter is now the preferred way to deploy Next applications to the Cloudflare platform, instead of Next on Pages.

Read on to learn what is possible today, and about our plans for the coming months.

OpenNext

OpenNext is a build tool designed to transform Next.js applications into packages optimized for deployment across various platforms. Initially created for serverless environments on AWS Lambda, OpenNext has expanded its capabilities to support a wider range of environments, including Cloudflare Workers and traditional Node.js servers.

By integrating with the OpenNext codebase, the Cloudflare adapter is now able to Continue reading

Pools across the sea: how Hyperdrive speeds up access to databases and why we’re making it free

Free as in beer

In acknowledgement of its pivotal role in building distributed applications that rely on regional databases, we’re making Hyperdrive available on the free plan of Cloudflare Workers!

Hyperdrive enables you to build performant, global apps on Workers with your existing SQL databases. Tell it your database connection string, bring your existing drivers, and Hyperdrive will make connecting to your database faster. No major refactors or convoluted configuration required.

Over the past year, Hyperdrive has become a key service for teams that want to build their applications on Workers and connect to SQL databases. This includes our own engineering teams, with Hyperdrive serving as the tool of choice to connect from Workers to our own Postgres clusters for many of the control-plane actions of our billing, D1, R2, and Workers KV teams (just to name a few). 

This has highlighted for us that Hyperdrive is a fundamental building block, and it solves a common class of problems for which there isn’t a great alternative. We want to make it possible for everyone building on Workers to connect to their database of choice with the best performance possible, using the drivers and frameworks they already know 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

“Just use Vite”… with the Workers runtime

Today, we are announcing the 1.0 release of the Cloudflare Vite plugin, as well as official support for React Router v7!

Over the past few years, Vite’s meteoric rise has seen it become one of the most popular build tools for web development, with a large ecosystem and vibrant community. The Cloudflare Vite plugin brings the Workers runtime right into its beating heart! Previously, the Vite dev server would always run your server code in Node.js, even if you were deploying to Cloudflare Workers. By using the new Environment API, released experimentally in Vite 6, your Worker code can now run inside the native Cloudflare Workers runtime (workerd). This means that the dev server matches the production behavior as closely as possible, and provides confidence as you develop and deploy your applications.

Vite 6 includes the most significant changes to Vite’s architecture since its inception and unlocks many new possibilities for the ecosystem. Fundamental to this is the Environment API, which enables the Vite dev server to interact with any number of custom runtime environments. This means that it is now possible to run server code in alternative JavaScript runtimes, such as our Continue reading

Skip the setup: deploy a Workers application in seconds

You can now add a Deploy to Cloudflare button to the README of your Git repository containing a Workers application — making it simple for other developers to quickly set up and deploy your project! 

The Deploy to Cloudflare button: 

  1. Creates a new Git repository on your GitHub/ GitLab account: Cloudflare will automatically clone and create a new repository on your account, so you can continue developing. 

  2. Automatically provisions resources the app needs: If your repository requires Cloudflare primitives like a Workers KV namespace, a D1 database, or an R2 bucket, Cloudflare will automatically provision them on your account and bind them to your Worker upon deployment. 

  3. Configures Workers Builds (CI/CD): Every new push to your production branch on your newly created repository will automatically build and deploy courtesy of Workers Builds. 

  4. Adds preview URLs to each pull request: If you’d like to test your changes before deploying, you can push changes to a non-production branch and preview URLs will be generated and posted back to GitHub as a comment.   

There is nothing more frustrating than struggling to kick the tires on a new project because you don’t know where to start. Continue reading

iBGP Local-AS Details

Did you know you could use the neighbor local-as BGP functionality to fake an iBGP session between different autonomous systems? I knew Cisco IOS supported that monstrosity for ages (supposedly “to merge two ISPs that have different AS numbers”) and added the appropriate tweaks1 into netlab when I added the BGP local-as support in release 1.3.1. Someone couldn’t resist pushing us down that slippery slope, and we ended with IBGP local-as implemented on 18 platforms (almost a dozen network operating systems).

I even wrote a related integration test, and all our implementations passed it until I asked myself a simple question: “But does it work?” and the number of correct implementations that passed the test without warnings dropped to zero.

Read more …

NB521: Optics Advances in the Data Center; Google Extends Gmail’s End-to-End Encryption

Take a Network Break! We check in on a serious Firefox vulnerability, explore NIST’s latest post-quantum encryption algorithm, and discuss a broken auto-update functionality in VMware Workstation. NetBox adds config drift detection to its network automation software, the startup Lightmatter tackles co-packaged optics, and Corning launches Glassworks AI in a bid to replace copper cabling... Read more »

Piecing together the Agent puzzle: MCP, authentication & authorization, and Durable Objects free tier

It’s not a secret that at Cloudflare we are bullish on the future of agents. We’re excited about a future where AI can not only co-pilot alongside us, but where we can actually start to delegate entire tasks to AI. 

While it hasn’t been too long since we first announced our Agents SDK to make it easier for developers to build agents, building towards an agentic future requires continuous delivery towards this goal. Today, we’re making several announcements to help accelerate agentic development, including:

  • New Agents SDK capabilities: Build remote MCP clients, with transport and authentication built-in, to allow AI agents to connect to external services. 

  • BYO Auth provider for MCP: Integrations with Stytch, Auth0, and WorkOS to add authentication and authorization to your remote MCP server. 

  • Hibernation for McpAgent: Automatically sleep stateful, remote MCP servers when inactive and wake them when needed. This allows you to maintain connections for long-running sessions while ensuring you’re not paying for idle time. 

  • Durable Objects free tier: We view Durable Objects as a key component for building agents, and if you’re using our Agents SDK, you need access to it. Until today, Durable Objects Continue reading

Cloudflare acquires Outerbase to expand database and agent developer experience capabilities

I’m thrilled to share that Cloudflare has acquired Outerbase. This is such an amazing opportunity for us, and I want to explain how we got here, what we’ve built so far, and why we are so excited about becoming part of the Cloudflare team.

Databases are key to building almost any production application: you need to persist state for your users (or agents), be able to query it from a number of different clients, and you want it to be fast. But databases aren’t always easy to use: designing a good schema, writing performant queries, creating indexes, and optimizing your access patterns tends to require a lot of experience. Add that to exposing your data through easy-to-grok APIs that make the ‘right’ way to do things obvious, a great developer experience (from dashboard to CLI), and well… there’s a lot of work involved.

The Outerbase team is already getting to work on some big changes to how databases (and your data) are viewed, edited, and visualized from within Workers, and we’re excited to give you a few sneak peeks into what we’ll be landing as we get to work.

Database DX

When we first started Outerbase, we saw how Continue reading

Cloudflare Workflows is now GA: production-ready durable execution

Betas are useful for feedback and iteration, but at the end of the day, not everyone is willing to be a guinea pig or can tolerate the occasional sharp edge that comes along with beta software. Sometimes you need that big, shiny “Generally Available” label (or blog post), and now it’s Workflows’ turn.

Workflows, our serverless durable execution engine that allows you to build long-running, multi-step applications (some call them “step functions”) on Workers, is now GA.

In short, that means it’s production ready —  but it also doesn’t mean Workflows is going to ossify. We’re continuing to scale Workflows (including more concurrent instances), bring new capabilities (like the new waitForEvent API), and make it easier to build AI agents with our Agents SDK and Workflows.

If you prefer code to prose, you can quickly install the Workflows starter project and start exploring the code and the API with a single command:

npm create cloudflare@latest workflows-starter -- 
--template="cloudflare/workflows-starter"

How does Workflows work? What can I build with it? How do I think about building AI agents with Workflows and the Agents SDK? Well, read on.

Building with Workflows

Workflows is a durable execution engine built on Cloudflare Workers that Continue reading

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