All posts by Dan Lapid

Your Worker can now have its own cache in front of it

Post Syndicated from Dan Lapid original https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-cache/

Today we are launching Workers Cache: a tiered cache that sits in front of your Worker, configured by a single line of Wrangler config and the same Cache-Control headers you already know.

When Workers Cache is enabled, every cacheable request to your Worker hits Cloudflare’s cache first. If there’s a fresh cached response, Cloudflare returns it directly — your Worker doesn’t run, and you don’t pay CPU time for it. On a miss, your Worker runs, and if your response is cacheable, Cloudflare stores it for the next request. The next request from anywhere on Earth can be served straight from cache.


The whole thing is one config block:

{
  "name": "my-worker",
  "main": "src/index.ts",
  "compatibility_date": "2026-05-01",
  "cache": {
    "enabled": true
  }
}

After that, you control caching the way HTTP has always wanted you to — by setting headers on your responses:

return new Response(body, {
  headers: {
    "Cache-Control": "public, max-age=300, stale-while-revalidate=3600",
    "Cache-Tag": "products,product:123",
  },
});

And when content changes, your Worker purges its own cache:

await ctx.cache.purge({ tags: ["product:123"] });

That’s the whole API. There is no zone to configure, no rules engine to set up, no separate cache to provision, and no second product to log into. The Worker’s code is the configuration surface, and the cache follows the Worker wherever it runs — on a custom domain, on workers.dev, behind a service binding, in a preview, in a Workers for Platforms tenant. One Worker, one cache, configured once.

That’s the surface area. There’s a lot underneath: tiered caching across our entire network, full support for stale-while-revalidate so stale responses never block a user, content negotiation via Vary, multi-tenant-safe cache keys via ctx.props, programmatic purges by tag or path prefix, and — the part we think is the biggest unlock — a cache that sits in front of every Worker entrypoint, not just the public one, with per-entrypoint control over which ones cache and which don’t. That last piece means you can compose caching directly into the structure of your app: a chain of entrypoints with cache stages slotted in wherever you want them, configured by the code on either side. We’ll walk through all of it below.

Workers Cache is available today to every Worker on any plan, enabled in Wrangler.

This is the caching API we’ve always wanted Workers to have. Here’s why it took us this long, what becomes possible because of it, and what’s coming next.

Why server-rendered apps need a cache in front

When we introduced Workers in 2017, the pitch was that you could run code on Cloudflare’s network to transform requests on their way to your origin. The Worker sat in front of the cache and the origin:


This was the right model for the use cases we were targeting. If you wanted to add a header to every request, rewrite a URL, do an A/B split, or filter traffic before it reached your origin, putting the Worker in front of the cache and the origin gave you full control over what got cached and what didn’t. Customers built incredible things with it.

But the world changed. Workers stopped being a thing you bolted onto an origin and started being the origin. Frameworks like Astro, TanStack Start, Next.js, Remix, and SvelteKit all ship a Cloudflare adapter that builds your app as a Worker. There’s no origin behind them. The Worker is the server.

When the Worker is the origin, the original architecture has nothing to cache. Every request runs your code, even when the response would be byte-for-byte identical to the one you returned a second ago. The Workers runtime is fast enough that this works — it routinely handles tens of millions of requests per second without breaking a sweat — but “fast enough to render every request” still costs you latency on every page load and CPU time on every invocation. And on a server-rendered app, every page load is, by definition, a render.

Workers Cache flips the architecture. Cloudflare’s cache now sits in front of the Worker:


On a cache hit, your Worker doesn’t run at all. Cloudflare returns the cached response and your CPU billing stays at zero. On a miss, your Worker runs once, populates the cache, and the next request — from anywhere — gets served from cache without invoking your code.

This is what was missing for server-side rendering on Workers. You used to have to choose between two unsatisfying options:

  • Prerender everything at build time (“static site generation”). Fast page loads, but every change requires a full rebuild and redeploy. For a docs site with a few thousand pages, that’s 5–10 minutes. For a large e-commerce site, it’s worse — and the build runs every single time you touch anything.

  • Render every page on every request. Up-to-date content, but every page load pays the rendering cost and every visitor pays the latency.

Workers Cache gives you a third option: server-render on demand, cache the rendered response, refresh it on a time-to-live (TTL) you choose. The first request to a new page still renders. Every subsequent request, until the cache expires, is served as if the page were static. When the cache expires, the next request triggers a re-render — and with stale-while-revalidate, even that one doesn’t wait.

You get the speed of a static site without the build time, and the freshness of server rendering without the cost. No framework-specific machinery like Incremental Static Regeneration. Just HTTP caching, working the way it was designed to work, in front of code that was designed to be the origin.

stale-while-revalidate is the part that makes it feel instant

The stale-while-revalidate directive tells Cloudflare that when a cached response expires, it’s allowed to serve the stale copy immediately while it refreshes the response in the background. Cloudflare shipped full support for stale-while-revalidate earlier this year, and it’s the directive that turns “we cache your Worker” into “your Worker’s site feels static.”

Without it, the first request after a cache entry expires has to wait for the Worker to render the page from scratch. The user sees that latency. With it, the first request after expiration gets the stale page immediately (with a Cf-Cache-Status: UPDATING header), and the Worker runs in the background to refill the cache. Every user, including the one who triggered the refresh, gets a cache-speed response.


In practice, this looks like:

 export default {
  async fetch(request) {
    const html = await renderPage(request);
    return new Response(html, {
      headers: {
        "Content-Type": "text/html; charset=utf-8",
        // Treat as fresh for 5 minutes; serve stale for up to an hour
        // while a background refresh runs.
        "Cache-Control": "public, max-age=300, stale-while-revalidate=3600",
      },
    });
  },
};

The mental model that makes this click:

  • Fresh window (max-age): Cloudflare serves the cached response. Your Worker doesn’t run.

  • Stale window (stale-while-revalidate): Cloudflare serves the cached response. Your Worker runs in the background to refresh it. No user waits.

  • Outside both windows: Cloudflare runs your Worker to generate a fresh response, and the user waits for that one render.

You pick the windows. For a product catalog that updates every few minutes, max-age=300, stale-while-revalidate=3600 means visitors basically never wait, and your Worker still runs often enough to keep content fresh. For a blog archive that almost never changes, max-age=86400, stale-while-revalidate=2592000 means your Worker runs once a day per page.

The first request to a brand-new page is the only one that pays the full render cost. After that, the page behaves like static output for visitors, while your Worker still owns how the page gets generated.

One URL, many representations: Vary works

Real apps rarely return the same bytes to every client. The same product page might be HTML for a browser and JSON for an API client. The same image might be WebP for clients that support it and JPEG for the ones that don’t. The same homepage might come back in English, French, or Japanese depending on the user.

Doing this without a cache is easy — your Worker just reads the request header and returns the right thing. Doing it with a cache is where it usually gets ugly. Most caches give you two bad options: cache nothing on URLs that have multiple representations, or cache one representation and serve it to everyone.

Workers Cache supports the standard HTTP Vary header, which is the right way to solve this. When your Worker returns a response with Vary: Accept-Encoding (or Accept, or Accept-Language, or any other request header), Cloudflare stores a separate cached variant per distinct combination of those headers — and only returns a variant whose stored values match the incoming request.

export default {
  async fetch(request) {
    const accept = request.headers.get("Accept") ?? "";
    const wantsWebp = accept.includes("image/webp");

    const body = wantsWebp ? await fetchWebpImage() : await fetchJpegImage();

    return new Response(body, {
      headers: {
        "Content-Type": wantsWebp ? "image/webp" : "image/jpeg",
        "Cache-Control": "public, max-age=3600",
        // Cache a separate variant per distinct Accept header value.
        Vary: "Accept",
      },
    });
  },
};

One URL, two cached variants. A browser that sends Accept: image/webp,*/* gets the WebP. A browser that sends Accept: image/jpeg gets the JPEG. Both come from cache. Your Worker writes both variants on the first request to each, and then runs zero times for either after that.

This is the well-trodden HTTP standard for content negotiation, and Workers Cache implements it the way RFC 9110 and RFC 9111 describe. There’s no allowlist of what headers you can Vary on. You list whatever you need, and Cloudflare keys variants on the verbatim values. The docs go through the edge cases — how to keep variant fan-out under control by normalizing headers in a gateway Worker, why purges invalidate all variants of a URL together, and the one case (Vary: *) that disables caching entirely.

This is your Worker’s cache, not your zone’s

Before we get to what becomes possible with all this, there’s a conceptual shift worth naming.

Cloudflare has had a cache forever. It’s configured at the zone level: Cache Rules, Page Rules, the cached-file-extensions list, Cache Reserve, Tiered Cache topology, custom cache keys. All of it is set per zone, and historically a Worker had to either fit into that zone’s configuration or work around it.

Workers Cache is different. It’s your Worker’s cache — it belongs to the Worker, not to a zone. This has a bunch of consequences that turn out to matter:

  • There is no zone configuration to manage. Cache Rules, cache level settings, the file-extensions list, Page Rules — none of them apply to Workers Cache. The Worker’s Cache-Control headers are the configuration.

  • The cache follows the Worker, not the hostname. A Worker that’s bound to api.example.com, api.example.net, and invoked over a service binding shares one cache across all three. A request to /users/42 hits the same cached entry regardless of which way in it came.

  • The cache works on workers.dev. It works in preview URLs (each preview gets its own cache, so testing a change doesn’t poison production). It works in Workers for Platforms (each user Worker has its own cache, isolated from the dispatcher and from other tenants). All of these used to be second-class citizens for caching. They aren’t anymore.

  • Purges are scoped to the Worker’s entrypoint. When you call ctx.cache.purge({ purgeEverything: true }), you’re only purging your Worker entrypoint’s cache. No risk of nuking your zone’s other content. No risk of one Worker’s deploy invalidating another’s data.

What you configure about caching, you configure in code: which paths get longer TTLs (branch on the path and set a different max-age), which requests bypass the cache (return Cache-Control: private), how the cache key is shaped (control what gets into ctx.props, normalize the URL in a gateway Worker before dispatching). The Worker you already wrote is the configuration surface.

The full docs go deep on this in Workers Cache: your Worker’s cache.

Two tiers, every Worker, no configuration

Workers Cache is regionally tiered by default. There are two layers:

  • A lower tier in the Cloudflare data center closest to the user. Every data center that receives traffic for your Worker has its own lower-tier cache.

  • An upper tier that aggregates fills across the whole network. There are fewer of these, and every lower tier consults the upper tier on a miss.

A request hits the lower tier first. On a hit, the response is served and that’s the end of it. On a miss, the lower tier asks the upper tier. On a hit there, the response is returned and also stored in the lower tier on the way back. Only if both tiers miss does your Worker actually run — and the response from that run gets stored in both tiers.


The reason this matters is that the first request anywhere in the world populates the upper tier. Every subsequent request, from any data center, can be served from the upper tier without your Worker running — even if the lower tier at that data center has never seen the request before. Cache hit ratios are dramatically higher than they would be with a single flat cache layer, which is exactly what you want when your Worker is the origin.

This is the same topology that powers Tiered Cache for zones today, except you don’t configure it. There is no dialog for “turn on tiered cache for my Worker.” Every Worker that has caching enabled gets tiering for free.

If your Worker uses Smart Placement, the cache composes cleanly with it: tiers are consulted first, and only if both miss does Smart Placement route execution close to your origin. We have more to say about how those layers interact, including a few rough edges we’re planning to smooth out, in the docs.

Run your app near the user and near the data

There’s a recurring tension in web performance that nobody has fully resolved: you want your code to run close to the user (because the round-trip between user and server is on the critical path), and you want your code to run close to the data (because every database query is also a round-trip). Pick one, and the other gets slow.

We’ve spent years chasing both. Our network puts us within ~50ms of about 95% of the world’s Internet users. Smart Placement and Placement Hints let you keep your code close to your data without ever having to think about cloud regions. But until now, the two pieces didn’t fully compose. You could do “near the user” or “near the data,” and if you wanted both halves of your app to be in the right place at the same time, you had to be a Cloudflare expert. We knew we could do better.

Workers Cache is the piece that closes the gap. Because the cache belongs to the Worker (not the zone), and because service bindings and ctx.exports calls between Workers go through the cache, you can build an app as a chain of Workers — each one running where it should run — with the cache as the seam between them.

The architecture looks like this:


  • Worker A runs near the user. It handles the cheap, latency-sensitive parts of every request: authentication, rate limiting, routing, header normalization, rendering the outer “shell” of an HTML page that doesn’t depend on data.

  • Worker B runs near the data, courtesy of Smart Placement or an explicit Placement Hint. It does the heavy work: server-rendering pages that fetch data, reading product catalogs, generating search results, aggregating APIs, expensive transforms.

  • Workers Cache sits in front of Worker B. When Worker A calls Worker B over a service binding, Cloudflare checks Worker B’s cache first. On a hit, Worker A receives the response and Worker B doesn’t run at all — no data-center hop, no database query, no rendering work.

The cache hit path becomes: user → Worker A near the user → cache hit for Worker B → response. The data hop is paid only on a miss. Your hot pages run at the speed of code-in-front-of-the-user, and your cold pages still benefit from running near the data when they do execute.

You don’t have to architect anything special to get this. Write your app as two Workers, point one at the other with a service binding, turn caching on in Worker B’s wrangler.jsonc file, and you’re done.


Multi-tenant by default, with ctx.props

If you’re caching a Worker that returns user-specific data — say, an API that serves different content per logged-in user — you need a way to make sure one user can never see another user’s cached response. The standard solution is “don’t cache authenticated requests,” and Cloudflare’s automatic bypass for Authorization headers does exactly that. But “don’t cache anything” gives up the entire performance win.

Workers Cache solves this by making the caller’s ctx.props part of the cache key. When one Worker calls another over a service binding and passes ctx.props with a user ID, tenant ID, or any other identifier, callers with different props get separate cache entries. One user’s response can never leak into another user’s cache.

import { WorkerEntrypoint } from "cloudflare:workers";

interface Props { userId: string; }

export default class Backend extends WorkerEntrypoint<Env, Props> {
  async fetch(request: Request): Promise<Response> {
    // ctx.props.userId is part of the cache key. User A and User B
    // requesting the same URL get separate cached entries.
    const { userId } = this.ctx.props;
    const data = await loadUserData(userId);

    return new Response(JSON.stringify(data), {
      headers: {
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
        "Cache-Control": "public, max-age=300",
      },
    });
  }
}

The typical pattern is to authenticate the request in a gateway Worker, strip the Authorization header, set the authenticated user’s ID into ctx.props, and then call the cached backend Worker. The gateway runs on every request (it has to, to authenticate), but the expensive backend only runs when there’s no cache entry for that user yet. Auth’d APIs go from “uncacheable” to “cached per user with full safety,” and the cache key does the isolation for you. The docs walk through this in detail in Multi-tenant safety with ctx.props and the example in Per-user authenticated responses.

Other CDNs make you choose between correctness and hit ratio: key the cache by each user’s token, or send every request back to origin for authorization. Workers Cache lets you share cached API responses at the edge while preserving per-request authorization boundaries. We don’t know of another CDN that offers this as a built-in model for authenticated, multi-tenant APIs. We’re pretty proud of it.

A cache between every Worker entrypoint

Here is the part of Workers Cache that we think is the biggest unlock, and it’s the part that’s hardest to see if you’re thinking about it as “a CDN cache that happens to work in front of Workers.”

Workers Cache sits in front of every Worker entrypoint — the default export, every named WorkerEntrypoint, and every call between entrypoints in the same Worker via ctx.exports. That last clause is the one that changes what you can build.

When one entrypoint calls another via ctx.exports, the cache evaluates that call the same way it would evaluate a request from a browser. A hit returns the cached response and the callee never runs. A miss runs the callee and stores its response under its own cache key — keyed by the callee’s entrypoint, path, query string, and ctx.props. The caller still runs on every request, but anything it hands off to the callee is memoized independently.

You decide, per entrypoint, which ones cache. In your Wrangler config, the exports map lets you turn caching on or off for each entrypoint by name ("default" is the default export). Opt an entrypoint in to cache the responses it produces; opt one out to keep it running on every request. A gateway or router entrypoint — anything that authenticates, normalizes, or dispatches — should be opted out, so it always runs, and its own output is never served from cache.

That gives you a primitive you can compose. You can author a Worker as a chain of small entrypoints — auth, normalization, routing, the expensive read, the data layer — and let Workers Cache slot in wherever you want it. Each cached entrypoint is a unit of memoization with its own key, its own TTL, and its own tag namespace for purging. Anything you would want to configure about caching — when it runs, what it keys on, when it invalidates — is expressed as ordinary Worker code: which entrypoint you call, what request you forward, what ctx.props you pass, what Cache-Control you set.

To make this concrete, here’s a single Worker that does three things you couldn’t easily do together on any other platform: it authenticates every request, caches the expensive backend behind a multi-tenant-safe cache key, and invalidates that cache when data changes.

Caching is configured per entrypoint. The gateway must run on every request — both to authenticate and because a cached gateway response would skip that auth check — so we disable caching on the default entrypoint and enable it only on the inner one:

{
  "name": "my-worker",
  "main": "src/index.ts",
  "compatibility_date": "2026-05-01",
  "cache": { "enabled": true },
  "exports": {
    // The gateway runs on every request — don't cache it.
    "default": { "type": "worker", "cache": { "enabled": false } },
    // Cache the expensive inner entrypoint.
    "CachedBackend": { "type": "worker", "cache": { "enabled": true } }
  }
}
import { WorkerEntrypoint } from "cloudflare:workers";

interface Env { API_TOKEN: string; }
interface Props { userId: string; }

// Inner entrypoint: the expensive work. Workers Cache sits in front
// of this — on a hit, this code never runs.
export class CachedBackend extends WorkerEntrypoint<Env, Props> {
  async fetch(request: Request): Promise<Response> {
    // ctx.props.userId is part of the cache key, so this is cached
    // separately for every user.
    const { userId } = this.ctx.props;
    const data = await loadExpensiveData(userId);

    return new Response(JSON.stringify(data), {
      headers: {
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
        "Cache-Control": "public, max-age=300, stale-while-revalidate=3600",
        "Cache-Tag": `user:${userId}`,
      },
    });
  }

  // Invalidate a user's cached response. purge() is scoped to the
  // entrypoint that calls it, so it must run inside CachedBackend —
  // the entrypoint that owns the cached response.
  async invalidate(userId: string): Promise<void> {
    await this.ctx.cache.purge({ tags: [`user:${userId}`] });
  }
}

// Outer entrypoint: runs on every request to authenticate and route.
// Caching is disabled for it in Wrangler config (above), so it always
// runs and the auth check is never skipped by a cache hit.
export default {
  async fetch(request, env, ctx): Promise<Response> {
    const userId = await authenticate(request, env);
    if (!userId) return new Response("Unauthorized", { status: 401 });

    // Invalidate this user's cache on writes, from the entrypoint that
    // owns it.
    if (request.method === "POST") {
      await handleWrite(request, userId);
      await ctx.exports.CachedBackend.invalidate(userId);
      return new Response("OK");
    }

    // For reads: strip Authorization (otherwise Cloudflare's automatic
    // bypass fires and nothing caches), then dispatch to the cached
    // backend with the authenticated user's identity in ctx.props.
    const forwarded = new Request(request);
    forwarded.headers.delete("Authorization");

    return ctx.exports.CachedBackend.fetch(forwarded, {
      props: { userId },
    });
  },
} satisfies ExportedHandler<Env>;

The whole thing is one Worker. One source file. One deploy. But there are two execution stages — caching is turned off for the gateway and on for the backend in one small exports block — and a cache sits between them, keyed per user, invalidated by the write path, and serving stale during background refreshes. The cache stage isn’t something you bolted on. It’s a layer of the program, written in code.

The patterns this composes into are open-ended. The same shape works for:

  • Caching a Durable Object. Wrap the Durable Object behind an entrypoint, set Cache-Control on the response, and reads stop touching the Durable Object on a hit. Writes go to the DO directly and purge the cache by tag. The DO stays unaware that caching is happening.

  • Normalizing Accept-Encoding before Vary. The outer entrypoint restores the original encoding from request.cf.clientAcceptEncoding (Cloudflare’s front line normalizes it for cache efficiency) and forwards to a cached entrypoint that varies on the real value. Hit ratios stay high; clients get the right encoding.

  • Stripping tracking parameters before caching. The outer entrypoint canonicalizes the URL — or sets a custom cache key with cf.cacheKey on the ctx.exports call — so the cached inner entrypoint sees only the canonical form, and ?utm_source=anything collapses to a single cache entry.

Stack them. A single Worker can have an outer entrypoint that authenticates and routes, a normalization entrypoint that strips tracking parameters and restores encoding headers, a cached entrypoint that fronts a Durable Object, and a separate cached entrypoint for an unauthenticated public API — each connected by a cache stage you didn’t configure, just decided where to put. The Examples page in the docs walks through several of these end-to-end.

We don’t know of another platform where you can do this. CDN caches sit in front of an origin. Function platforms run functions. We don’t know of another platform that gives you a cache that sits inside a single deployable unit, between the parts of your application, with each cache stage configured by the code on either side of it. That’s what Workers Cache is. And because it composes with everything else the platform already gives you — Smart Placement, Durable Objects, service bindings, ctx.props, ctx.exports — the patterns you can build are open-ended. We’ve barely scratched the surface in this post.

First-class support in your framework

If you’re building with Astro, the Cloudflare adapter wires up Workers Cache for you. Just add the cacheCloudflare provider to your configuration:

// astro.config.mjs
import { defineConfig } from "astro/config";
import cloudflare from "@astrojs/cloudflare";
import { cacheCloudflare } from "@astrojs/cloudflare/cache";

export default defineConfig({
  adapter: cloudflare(),
  output: "server",
  experimental: {
    cache: { provider: cacheCloudflare() },
    routeRules: {
      "/products/*": { maxAge: 300, swr: 3600, tags: ["products"] },
      "/blog/*":     { maxAge: 60,  swr: 86400, tags: ["blog"] },
    },
  },
});

The adapter enables the cache, sets the right headers on the responses Astro generates, attaches Cache-Tag values for invalidation, and gives you a cache.invalidate() helper for purging tags when content changes. Astro pages that opt into server rendering automatically get the “render once, cache, refresh in the background” flow described above — no per-route configuration required, no framework-specific runtime layer to learn.

We’re working with the maintainers of other frameworks to ship the same integration. If you build a framework adapter for Cloudflare, the Workers Cache APIs are exactly what you’d want them to be — header-driven configuration, programmatic purges, no platform-specific concepts to model.

See your cache on the same dashboard as your Worker

Caching is only useful if you can see what it’s doing. The Workers Observability dashboard now surfaces cache hit information per invocation:


You can see, per Worker:

  • Cache hit ratio over time. The number you want trending up after you enable caching.

  • Hits, misses, updates, bypasses broken down. If your hit ratio is low, this is where you find out why — too many BYPASS responses (because something is setting a cookie?), too many MISS responses (because the cache key is partitioning more than you thought?), too many UPDATING responses (because max-age is shorter than your traffic interval?).

Because all of this lives on the same dashboard as your Worker’s other observability — logs, exceptions, CPU time, request counts — you don’t have to context-switch between looking at your zone and your Worker to understand what’s happening.

Billing

Cache hits don’t run your Worker, and they don’t bill CPU time. They do count as a request at the standard Workers request rate, the same as any other invocation. Cache misses and bypasses bill normally — request + CPU time, exactly as they would without caching.

Outcome

Request charge

CPU time charge

Cache HIT (Worker does not run)

Standard rate

Not billed

Cache MISS (Worker runs)

Standard rate

Billed

Cache BYPASS (Worker runs)

Standard rate

Billed

Static asset request

Standard rate

Not billed

Worker-to-worker invocation

Standard rate

Billed if the Worker runs

There’s no separate Workers Cache SKU and no per-GB cache storage fee. Tiered caching, purges, stale-while-revalidate, and the analytics described above are all included.  If a request would have run your Worker and Workers Cache serves it as a hit instead, you still pay the standard request rate, but you pay no CPU time for that request. Because of this, that cache hit costs less than rendering the same response in your Worker.

One thing to watch: when caching is enabled, requests that are normally free — static asset requests and worker-to-worker invocations through service bindings or ctx.exports — are billed at the standard request rate, because each one now consults the cache in front of your Worker.

What’s next

Things we know we want to do next:

  • Smarter co-location with Smart Placement. Today, Cloudflare chooses the upper-tier cache and Smart Placement target separately. On a full miss, the request may travel between Cloudflare locations twice: once to check the upper tier, and again to run your Worker near its data. We’re working to coordinate those choices, so a miss only makes that long-distance trip once.

  • Larger response size limits. At launch, all responses follow the Free plan’s cacheable size limit (512 MB), regardless of your account. That’s temporary — the standard per-plan cache limits will apply once we finish a few rollout steps.

  • More framework integrations. Astro has built-in integration with Workers Cache. We’re working with maintainers to add similar integrations to other frameworks, including TanStack Start and Next.js via Vinext.

  • An API to mark cached responses stale. ctx.cache.purge() removes matching responses from cache. We’re looking at a ctx.cache.invalidate() API that makes matching responses behave as expired, so the next request can still get a fast stale response with stale-while-revalidate while your Worker refreshes the cache in the background.

Try it

Workers Cache is available today to every Worker on any plan.

To get started, add "cache": { "enabled": true } to your wrangler.jsonc, redeploy, and start setting Cache-Control headers. The Workers Cache documentation walks through the full feature surface — including the quickstart, cache keys, purging, composition patterns and examples, and debugging.

Workers used to run in front of the cache. Now they can also run behind it. Use whichever side you need — or, with service bindings, both at once.

We can’t wait to see what you build.

Introducing Dynamic Workflows: durable execution that follows the tenant

Post Syndicated from Dan Lapid original https://blog.cloudflare.com/dynamic-workflows/

When we first launched Workers eight years ago, it was a direct-to-developers platform. Over the years, we have expanded and scaled the ecosystem so that platforms could not only build on Workers directly, but they could also enable their customers to ship code to us through many multi-tenant applications. We now see on Workers: Applications where users describe what they want, and the AI writes the implementation. Multi-tenant SaaS where every customer’s business logic is, at runtime, some TypeScript the platform has never seen before. Agents that write and run their own tools. CI/CD products where every repo defines its own pipeline.

Last month, when we shipped the Dynamic Workers open beta, we gave those platforms a clean primitive for the compute side: hand the Workers runtime some code at runtime, get back an isolated, sandboxed Worker, on the same machine, in single-digit milliseconds. Durable Object Facets extended the same idea to storage — each dynamically-loaded app can have its own SQLite database, spun up on demand, with the platform sitting in front, as a supervisor. Artifacts did the same for source control: a Git-native, versioned filesystem you can create by the tens of millions, one per agent, one per session, one per tenant. So, we have dynamic deployment for storage and source control. What’s next?

Today, we are bridging durable execution and dynamic deployment with Dynamic Workflows.

The gap between durable and dynamic execution

Cloudflare Workflows is our durable execution engine. It turns a run(event, step) function into a program where every step survives failures, can sleep for hours or days, can wait for external events, and resumes exactly where it left off when the isolate is recycled. It’s the right primitive for anything that has to “keep going” past a single request: onboarding flows, video transcoding pipelines, multi-stage billing, long-running agent loops, and — as of Workflows V2 — up to 50,000 concurrent instances and 300 new instances per second per account, redesigned for the agentic era.

But Workflows has always had one assumption baked in: the workflow code is part of your deployment. Your wrangler.jsonc has a block that says “when the engine calls into WORKFLOWS, run the class called MyWorkflow.” One binding, one class. Per deploy.

That works fine if you own all the code. It’s fine if you’re running a traditional application.

It stops working the moment you want to let your customer ship their workflow.

Say you’re building an app platform where the AI writes TypeScript for every tenant. Say you’re running a CI/CD product where each repository has its own pipeline. Say you’re using an agents SDK where each agent writes its own durable plan. In every one of these cases, the workflow is different for every tenant, every agent, every request. There is no single class to bind.

This is the same shape of problem that Dynamic Workers solved for compute and that Durable Object Facets solved for storage. We just hadn’t solved it for durable execution yet.

Dynamic Workflows

@cloudflare/dynamic-workflows is a small library. Roughly 300 lines of TypeScript. It lets a single Worker — the Worker Loader — route every create() call to a different tenant’s code, and, critically, have the Workflows engine dispatch run(event, step) back to that same code when the workflow actually executes, seconds or hours or days later.

Here’s the whole pattern. A Worker Loader:

import {
  createDynamicWorkflowEntrypoint,
  DynamicWorkflowBinding,
  wrapWorkflowBinding,
} from '@cloudflare/dynamic-workflows';

// The library looks this class up on cloudflare:workers exports.
export { DynamicWorkflowBinding };

function loadTenant(env, tenantId) {
  return env.LOADER.get(tenantId, async () => ({
    compatibilityDate: '2026-01-01',
    mainModule: 'index.js',
    modules: { 'index.js': await fetchTenantCode(tenantId) },
    // The tenant sees this as a normal Workflow binding.
    env: { WORKFLOWS: wrapWorkflowBinding({ tenantId }) },
  }));
}

// Register this as class_name in wrangler.jsonc.
export const DynamicWorkflow = createDynamicWorkflowEntrypoint<Env>(
  async ({ env, metadata }) => {
    const stub = loadTenant(env, metadata.tenantId);
    return stub.getEntrypoint('TenantWorkflow');
  }
);

export default {
  fetch(request, env) {
    const tenantId = request.headers.get('x-tenant-id');
    return loadTenant(env, tenantId).getEntrypoint().fetch(request);
  },
};

Add to your wrangler.jsonc:

"workflows": [
		{
			"name": "dynamic-workflow",
			"binding": "WORKFLOW",
			"class_name": "DynamicWorkflow"
		}
	]

The tenant writes plain, idiomatic Workflows code. They have no idea they’re being dispatched:

import { WorkflowEntrypoint } from 'cloudflare:workers';

export class TenantWorkflow extends WorkflowEntrypoint {
  async run(event, step) {
    return step.do('greet', async () => `Hello, ${event.payload.name}!`);
  }
}

export default {
  async fetch(request, env) {
    const instance = await env.WORKFLOWS.create({ params: await request.json() });
    return Response.json({ id: await instance.id });
  },
};

That’s it. The tenant calls env.WORKFLOWS.create(...) against what looks like a perfectly normal Workflow binding. Workflow IDs, .status(), .pause(), retries, hibernation, durable steps, step.sleep('24 hours'), step.waitForEvent() — everything works the way it always has.

The library handles one thing: making sure that when the Workflows engine eventually wakes up and calls run(event, step), it ends up inside the right tenant’s code.

How it works

Three layers: the Workflows engine (platform) on top, your Worker Loader in the middle, your tenant’s code (a Dynamic Worker) on the bottom. 


When a request reaches the Worker Loader, it routes the execution to the correct dynamic code on the fly. The rest of the execution is a handoff between these three layers, left-to-right in time: the request enters, bounces up to the engine, is persisted, and later bounces back down again.

Walking the flow:

① → ② Entering the tenant’s code. The Worker Loader receives an HTTP request, figures out which tenant it’s for, loads that tenant’s code via the Worker Loader, and forwards the request to its default.fetch. The env it hands the tenant contains WORKFLOWS: wrapWorkflowBinding({ tenantId }). As far as the tenant is concerned, that looks and acts like a real Workflow binding.

③ Up to the Worker Loader. When the tenant calls env.WORKFLOWS.create({ params }), it’s actually making a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) into the Worker Loader — the wrapped binding is a WorkerEntrypoint subclass (DynamicWorkflowBinding) that the runtime specialized with the tenant’s metadata at load time. That’s why you have to export { DynamicWorkflowBinding } from your Worker Loader: the runtime builds per-tenant stubs by looking the class up in cloudflare:workers exports. Bindings that cross the Dynamic Worker boundary have to be RPC stubs — a plain { create, get } object can’t be structured-cloned, and the raw Workflow binding isn’t serializable either.

Inside the Worker Loader, the wrapped binding transparently rewrites the payload:

tenant calls:  create({ params: { name: 'Alice' } })
                            │
                            ▼
engine sees:   create({ params: {
                  __workerLoaderMetadata: { tenantId: 't-42' },
                  params: { name: 'Alice' }
               }})

④ Up to the engine. The Worker Loader then calls .create() on the real WORKFLOWS binding with the envelope as the params. From here the Workflows engine takes over. It persists event.payload — which now includes the envelope — and schedules the run. Every time the engine later wakes up the workflow (whether that’s after a 24-hour sleep, a crash, or a deploy), the metadata rides along with the payload, waiting to route the run.

One implication: treat the metadata as a routing hint, not as authorization. The tenant can read it back via instance.status(). Don’t put secrets in there.

⑤ → ⑥ The engine comes back down. When the engine is ready to run a step, it calls .run(event, step) on the class you registered in wrangler.jsonc — the one createDynamicWorkflowEntrypoint gave you. That class unwraps the envelope, hands the metadata to the loadRunner callback you wrote, and forwards the unwrapped event through to whatever runner the callback returns.

The callback is where everything interesting happens, and it’s entirely yours. Fetch the tenant’s latest source from R2. Check their plan tier and pick a region. Attach a tail Worker for per-tenant logging. Bundle TypeScript on the fly with @cloudflare/worker-bundler. In the common case, you just hand off to the Worker Loader:

const stub = env.LOADER.get(tenantId, () => loadTenantCode(tenantId));
return stub.getEntrypoint('TenantWorkflow');

The Worker Loader caches by ID, so a workflow that runs many steps over many hours reuses the same dynamic Worker across them. When the isolate eventually gets evicted, the next step.do() pulls the code again and keeps going — the tenant’s workflow has no idea anything happened. A Dynamic Worker boots in single-digit milliseconds using a few megabytes of memory, so the dispatch overhead is essentially free. You can have a million tenants, each with their own distinct workflow code, each spun up lazily on the step boundary where it’s needed, and none of them cost anything while idle.

The escape hatch

If you want to subclass WorkflowEntrypoint yourself — to add logging around run(), wire up per-tenant observability, or thread custom state through — the library exposes the lower-level dispatchWorkflow primitive that createDynamicWorkflowEntrypoint is built on:

import { dispatchWorkflow } from '@cloudflare/dynamic-workflows';

export class MyDynamicWorkflow extends WorkflowEntrypoint {
  async run(event, step) {
    return dispatchWorkflow(
      { env: this.env, ctx: this.ctx },
      event,
      step,
      ({ metadata, env }) => loadRunnerForTenant(env, metadata),
    );
  }
}

Everything else — IDs, pause/resume, sendEvent, retries — falls through to the real Workflows engine untouched.

Dynamic Workers are the primitive

Step back from the specifics for a second. Every interesting line of this library is either a wrapper around .create() on the outbound side or a wrapper around WorkflowEntrypoint on the inbound side. The actual work — spinning up the tenant’s code, sandboxing it, routing RPC across the boundary, caching the isolate, hibernating between steps — is all done by Dynamic Workers underneath.

That’s the real story, and it’s a lot bigger than Workflows

Dynamic Workers is the primitive that swallows everything. Durable Object Facets is the same pattern applied to Durable Objects. Dynamic Workflows is that same pattern applied to WorkflowEntrypoint. Each one is the same small amount of envelope-and-unwrap glue between the static binding you’ve always had and the dynamic version you can now hand to your customers.

And we’re not stopping at Workflows. Every binding that Workers currently exposes is heading for a dynamic counterpart — queues where each producer ships its own handler, caches, databases, object stores, AI bindings, and MCP servers where every tenant brings their own tools. Whatever you bind to a Worker today, you will soon be able to bind dynamically: dispatched per tenant, per agent, per request, at zero idle cost.

The unit economics of running a platform like this are, frankly, absurd. Shipping a multi-tenant product used to mean giving every customer their own container, their own database, their own disk, their own scheduler, and stitching it together with orchestration glue, service meshes, and hair-pulling billing math. Many of these applications have to support thousands of customers at the very least; millions, at the most. On Dynamic Workers and everything composing on top of them, idle tenants cost approximately nothing and active tenants share the same hardware through isolate-level multi-tenancy. The floor drops several orders of magnitude. A platform that used to cap out at thousands of paying customers can now reasonably serve tens of millions.

What this unlocks

Agent platforms that plan like engineers

Coding agents — OpenCode, Claude Code, Codex, Pi — have been proving for the past year that LLMs are far better at writing code than at making sequential tool calls. The Cloudflare Agents SDK and Project Think extend that insight into durable execution: with primitives like fibers and sub-agents, an agent’s long-running plan can survive crashes, hibernation, and redeploys without the user noticing.

Dynamic Workflows is the piece that lets that plan be a first-class Cloudflare Workflow — something the agent literally writes and the platform literally runs, with the full durability machinery behind it. A run(event, step) function the model wrote a minute ago, where every step.do(...) is independently retryable, every step.sleep('24 hours') hibernates for free, and every step.waitForEvent(...) waits indefinitely for the human to approve the next action. The agent writes the workflow; the platform runs it; neither has to know ahead of time what the plan looks like.

SDKs and frameworks where the user brings the logic

If you’re shipping a framework where your customer writes the run(event, step) function — a workflow builder UI, a visual automation tool, a per-tenant extension system, a low-code tool for non-developers — Dynamic Workflows is now the primitive that makes it work without compromise. You call wrapWorkflowBinding({ tenantId }) once, hand the result to their code as WORKFLOWS, and every workflow instance they create is automatically tagged, routed back, and executed in their sandbox. The framework owns the Worker Loader; the user owns the workflow; neither has to care about the other.

CI/CD at primitive speed

Here’s the use case that’s been getting us most excited.

Every CI/CD platform in existence is, underneath, a dispatcher of per-repo configuration files: “run these steps, in this order, with these secrets, cache these directories, upload these artifacts.” Each repo has its own pipeline. Each branch might have its own variant. Each pull request spawns an instance of that pipeline that has to run to completion, survive a machine crash, retry a flaky step, stream logs, pause for approvals, and persist results.

That’s exactly the shape of a durable workflow. The reason CI hasn’t been built that way until now is that nobody had a cloud primitive where the workflow itself is different for every repo, dispatched at runtime, at zero provisioning cost. Now you do.

Here’s what a CI pipeline looks like when it’s just code your customer ships with their repo — say, in .cloudflare/ci.ts. The workflow itself is real; the runInSandbox() / summarise() / GitHub binding helpers below are platform-provided glue, the kind of thing you’d ship once in your dispatcher:

import { WorkflowEntrypoint } from 'cloudflare:workers';

export class CIPipeline extends WorkflowEntrypoint {
  async run(event, step) {
    const { repo, sha, branch, pr } = event.payload;

    // Fork an isolated copy of the repo at this commit. Seconds, not minutes.
    const workspace = await step.do('checkout', () =>
      this.env.ARTIFACTS.fork(repo, { sha })
    );

    await step.do('install', () => runInSandbox(workspace, ['pnpm', 'install']));

    // Each parallel step is independently retryable.
    const [lint, test, build] = await Promise.all([
      step.do('lint',  () => runInSandbox(workspace, ['pnpm', 'lint'])),
      step.do('test',  () => runInSandbox(workspace, ['pnpm', 'test'])),
      step.do('build', () => runInSandbox(workspace, ['pnpm', 'build'])),
    ]);

    if (pr) {
      await step.do('comment', () =>
        this.env.GITHUB.commentOnPR(repo, pr, summarise({ lint, test, build }))
      );
    }

    // Workflow hibernates until approval arrives. No VM held open.
    if (branch === 'main') {
      await step.waitForEvent('approval', { type: 'deploy-approval', timeout: '24 hours' });
      await step.do('deploy', () => runInSandbox(workspace, ['pnpm', 'deploy']));
    }
  }
}

The platform owns the dispatcher. It ingests a webhook, figures out which repo it came from, loads that repo’s CIPipeline class as a Dynamic Worker, and hands the run-off to Dynamic Workflows. The platform doesn’t know what’s in the pipeline. It doesn’t need to. It’s running a durable function that happens to live in the customer’s repo.

Now line up what each step actually does:

  • Artifacts gives every repo a Git-native, versioned filesystem that lives on Cloudflare’s globally distributed network. ArtifactFS hydrates the tree lazily, so even a multi-GB repo is ready to work within single-digit seconds — and fork() gives each CI run its own isolated copy, with no git clone tax.

  • Dynamic Workers run each lightweight step (lint, format, typecheck, bundle) in a sandboxed isolate that boots in milliseconds, on the same machine as the repo’s data. No VM provisioning, no image pull, no cold start.

  • Dynamic Workflows holds the whole run together. Steps are retryable and durable. The run hibernates for free while waiting on approvals. State and progress survive deploys, evictions, and crashes.

  • Sandboxes handle the heavy corners — the step that needs docker build, the integration suite that needs Postgres running, the Rust compile that needs 8 cores. Snapshots to R2 mean even those warm-start in a couple of seconds.

A traditional CI run for a mid-sized JS repo looks something like: allocate VM (15-30s) → pull base image (10s) → git clone (10s) → npm ci (30-60s) → run tests (actual work) → tear down. Several minutes of ceremony before the first test runs, and you pay for the whole VM the whole time.

The same pipeline on this stack looks like: edge fork of the repo (seconds) → each step boots a fresh isolate or snapshot-restored sandbox in milliseconds → runs the actual work → hibernates. Nothing has to cold-start. Nothing has to be provisioned ahead of time. Nothing has to be kept warm. The repo doesn’t move — the compute comes to it.

CI has never been this fast, and the reason it hasn’t is that none of these primitives have existed together in one place. Now they do.

Try it

@cloudflare/dynamic-workflows is MIT-licensed and on npm today:

npm install @cloudflare/dynamic-workflows

It runs on top of Dynamic Workers, which is in open beta on the Workers Paid plan. The repo includes a working example — an interactive browser playground where you write a TenantWorkflow class, hit Run, and watch the steps execute with live-streaming logs and a per-step checklist that lights up as each step.do() commits. Clone it, deploy it, show it to a coworker.

If you’re a platform, an SDK, a framework, or a CI/CD product, and you want to give your customers their own workflows without running their code in your own process: this is the primitive we built for you. If you’re building agents that write durable plans, this is the primitive that makes those plans real Workflows. If you’re just watching all of this, and it looks fun to build on top of: we’d love to see what you make.

Find us in the Cloudflare Developers Discord. We’ll be there all week.