Simply put, Cloudflare Workers is a serverless execution environment. It allows you to run JavaScript, Rust, C, and C++ code on Cloudflare’s global edge network (data centers in more than 300 cities worldwide).

If traditional servers are like a “central warehouse far away in a big city,” then Workers are like a “convenience store at your doorstep,” able to handle requests directly at the location closest to the user.

Core Roles of Workers

1. Edge computing (handle logic closest to the user)

Traditional servers might be in North America; for users in China, requests must cross the ocean, resulting in high latency. Workers code runs on edge nodes only a few milliseconds away from users.

• Use cases: Display different languages based on the user’s location, redirect traffic, or optimize images based on device type.

2. Enhance and modify HTTP requests

Workers are like an “intelligent filter” placed between the user’s browser and the origin server.

• Use cases: Security: filter malicious requests and add custom firewall rules.
• Header modification: Automatically add security headers to pages (such as HSTS, CSP) or remove sensitive information.
• Authentication: Check whether a user’s token is valid before the request reaches your origin server.

3. Build complete APIs and microservices

Because Workers integrates with D1 (database), KV (key-value storage), and Durable Objects (state storage), you can build applications without traditional servers.

• Use cases: Create a simple URL shortener, a commenting system, or a real-time chat backend.

4. Optimize website performance

• Use cases: Dynamically inject scripts or content into pages without modifying the source code.
• Custom caching strategies: More flexible than standard CDN caching; you can use complex logic to decide what should be cached and what shouldn’t.

What are the main uses?

• Low-latency request handling: Receive HTTP requests and return responses at edge nodes, reducing cross-region round-trip latency.
• Reverse proxy and gateway: Forward/rewrite requests and responses according to your rules (URL, Header, Cookie, Body) for canary releases, A/B testing, and dynamic routing.
• Security and risk control: Perform authentication, signature verification, rate limiting, blocking, bot detection integration, etc. before reaching the origin.
• Caching and acceleration: Fine-grained control of edge caching strategies (Cache API), custom cache keys, cache penetration protection, conditional caching.
• Authentication and sessions: Implement JWT/OAuth callback handling, SSO entry points, session validation; move auth to the edge to reduce origin load.
• Lightweight backend APIs: Provide simple API services, or aggregate multiple backends into a single interface (BFF).
• Static site enhancements: With Cloudflare Pages/static assets, do dynamic rendering fragments, rewrites, internationalization, and personalization at the edge.
• Integration with Cloudflare storage/queues: Such as KV (key-value), D1 (database), R2 (object storage), Durable Objects (stateful objects), Queues, etc., for persistence and async tasks.

Pricing plans

Service Item	Free Plan (Free)	Paid Plan (Paid - from $5/month)	Additional Usage Billing (after quota)
Base requests	100,000 / day	10,000,000 / month	$0.30 / million requests
CPU time	10 ms / request	30,000,000 ms / month	$0.02 / million ms
Workers logs	Unavailable / extremely limited	20,000,000 events (7-day retention)	Included in the plan
D1 database	5GB storage / 5M reads / 100k writes	5GB storage / 25B reads / 50M writes	Reads: $0.001/million; Writes: $1.00/million
KV storage	1GB storage / 100k reads / 1,000 writes	1GB storage / 10M reads / 100k writes	Reads: $0.50/million; Writes: $5.00/million
Durable Objects	Unavailable	1,000,000 requests / 40GB-s duration	Requests: $0.15/million; Storage: $0.20/GB
Queues	Unavailable	1,000,000 standard operations	$0.40 / million operations
AI Gateway logs	Limited	200,000 logs stored	-
Logpush	Unavailable	10,000,000 Trace Events	$0.05 / million logs

Changelog

1/9/26, 12:40 PM

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• f8f53-add database sectionon 1/9/26

Copyright

Copyright Ownership:Sakurajiamai

License under:Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0)

Contributors: SakurajimMai

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