# Cloudflare Workers [[Cloudflare]] Workers is a serverless execution environment that runs JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, and WebAssembly at the edge of Cloudflare's global network. Code runs inside V8 isolates rather than containers, which keeps cold starts in the low milliseconds and eliminates the per-instance overhead that makes traditional FaaS expensive at scale. The runtime is a subset of the standard Web Platform: `fetch`, `Request`, `Response`, `URL`, `WebSocket`, `Streams`, `Crypto`. There is no Node.js by default, though many Node APIs are now available via a compatibility flag. Workers are designed to be tiny, fast, and stateless ; persistent state lives in companion services like [[Cloudflare Durable Objects]], KV, R2, D1, and Queues. ## Why It Matters The combination of V8 isolates + global anycast deployment + tight integration with the rest of Cloudflare's edge gives Workers a performance and cost profile that is hard to match on AWS Lambda, Vercel, or Fly. Workers Free tier (100k requests/day) is enough to run real production traffic for personal projects, and Workers Paid (\$5/month for 10M requests) is the cheapest serverless platform on the market for most workloads. It is increasingly used as a control plane for AI agent infrastructure: brokers, credential managers, rate limiters, webhook routers. [[Crabbox]] uses a Worker (with a Durable Object) as its credential broker for leasing remote test machines. ## Common Use Cases - **API gateways and edge proxies**: rewrite requests, validate auth, fan out to backends - **A/B testing and personalization at the edge**: zero-latency cookie reads - **Webhook routing and transformation**: GitHub → Slack, Stripe → internal queue - **Auth brokers**: hold provider credentials, issue scoped tokens to clients - **AI control planes**: rate limit, meter spend, broker access to GPU/runner pools - **Static asset transformation**: image resizing, HTML rewriting ## Limits Worth Knowing - **CPU time**: 10 ms (free), 30 s (paid) per request on the standard Worker; longer for [[Cloudflare Durable Objects|Durable Object]] alarms and Queues consumers - **Memory**: 128 MB per isolate - **Bundle size**: 1 MB (free), 10 MB (paid) compressed - **No long-lived TCP**: Workers are request/response by design ; for sticky connections use Durable Objects with WebSocket hibernation ## References - Workers home: https://workers.cloudflare.com/ - Documentation: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/ - Pricing: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/ ## Related - [[Cloudflare]] - [[Cloudflare Pages]] - [[Cloudflare Durable Objects]] - [[Cloudflare R2]] - [[Cloudflare D1]] - [[Cloudflare KV]] - [[Cloudflare Vectorize]] - [[Cloudflare Hyperdrive]] - [[Cloudflare Workers AI]] - [[Cloudflare Agents SDK]] - [[Cloudflare Sandbox SDK]] - [[Cloudflare Queues]] - [[Cloudflare Pipelines]] - [[Cloudflare Containers]] - [[Cloudflare Browser Rendering]] - [[Cloudflare Email Routing and Sending]] - [[Cloudflare Flagship]] - [[Wrangler]] - [[Crabbox]] - [[OpenClaw]] - [[TypeScript]] - [[Rust]]