Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers is a serverless platform whose defining choice is architectural: rather than running each function in a container, Workers run in isolates. Cloudflare describes isolates as an order of magnitude more lightweight than containers, which is what allows them to scale up and down quickly enough to avoid the cold-start and pre-warming problems that container-based function platforms work around.

That choice produces the platform's two headline claims. The first is placement: a Worker is deployed once and runs in Cloudflare's 335 or more cities by default, with Smart Placement available to run code near your data instead when that minimises end-to-end latency. The second is the billing model. You pay only for CPU time, not for the idle time a function spends waiting on I/O, and there is no pre-provisioned concurrency to buy ahead of a traffic spike.

Workers is intended as a full-stack runtime rather than a place to park isolated functions. React, Vue and Next.js applications ship with their backend logic, databases and storage attached, and bindings connect a Worker to resources such as a database, KV storage, browser rendering, images and Workers AI models with a single declaration. Built-in Queues, Workflows and Cron Triggers cover webhook handling, data processing and scheduled work without a separate scheduler. Common edge patterns including authentication, rate limiting, routing and caching near the user are explicitly supported.

Local development is a first-class concern. workerd, Cloudflare's open source runtime, lets you test changes fully locally before pushing, and language-specific templates give a starting point for a new application. Pricing is tiered from a free plan for personal projects upward.