> This is the caching API we've always wanted Workers to have. Here's why it took us this long
I was looking forward to the "why it took us this long" explanation but it wasn't explicitly spelled out. Any Cloudflare staff here able to expand on that?
(The article does a good job of showing how many different smart design decisions went into this, but given caching is core to what a Cloudflare does I'm still a little surprised it took 9 years to get here!)
tshaddox 59 minutes ago [-]
The article was very clearly written or heavily edited by AI, which I suspect explains some of the peculiarities in structure and wording.
vlucas 1 hours ago [-]
Huge props to just sticking with the HTTP spec on this one with `Cache-Control` headers with `stale-while-revalidate` support. It's amazing how many other providers mess that up.
On top of that the cache tags are a slick way to do invalidation. This looks like a great product.
mchav 1 hours ago [-]
Great feature. Although I’m starting to get annoyed by obvious signs of LLM writing like no X, no Y etc.
xpct 1 hours ago [-]
People that don't like writing now get to write by offloading it to an LLM, and this is the result. I miss the world where articles were mostly written by people who had the interest and patience to do it.
383toast 44 minutes ago [-]
At least for me I don't really read these posts/docs, I just give the link to claude and it'll implement it regardless of wording
pythonaut_16 37 minutes ago [-]
Is this a bot or LLM reply? Because you've given this exact comment word for word at least twice in this thread...
dbbk 28 minutes ago [-]
I was a bit confused what this adds other than just standard CDN-Cache-Control page caching that we do now. Some quirks I've found;
- You still get billed per request, whether the request hits cache or not (but don't get billed for CPU time)
- You now get billed for static asset requests! This makes no sense to me. "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." Yeah that sounds like a bug that just happens to generate them more money.
- The cache key automatically has the worker deployment version, so even gradual deployments populate their own cache which is nice
- It seems like you can set a totally custom cache key? But that was previously Enterprise only, can't see if that's still the case here.
dangoodmanUT 1 hours ago [-]
finally, this was needed.
A big worry was always "why does workers sit in front of my cache? that's a waste of an invocation if i'm returning a cached result"
jasoncartwright 1 hours ago [-]
The previous Worker in-front of the cache never made sense to my old school proxy in-front of the appserver mindset. Already using this to speed up a tool. Nice work.
dbbk 24 minutes ago [-]
Cloudflare Snippets were actually better if you wanted to run logic before the cache (they are entirely free)
lekevicius 2 hours ago [-]
Amazing, exactly what Workers lacked, I was quite annoyed that a worker would spin up when 99% of my requests then return a cache. Waste of 3ms, times millions.
TimCTRL 35 minutes ago [-]
i just love the sweet $0 invoice at the end of each month for all these services.
Thanks CF.
NSUserDefaults 1 hours ago [-]
Reinventing the web, one service at a time. Is it really that hard to build things like this on a per-case base, small scale, all on a bare bones VPS? Do we need a global gateway to help us not screw up the basics? Service looks nice but makes me sad somehow.
jesse_dot_id 17 minutes ago [-]
As a DevOps engineer, if you learn to implement CF Workers with Claude Code's Cloudflare skill, you will no longer be burdened by this question. I'm running a Docker swarm on my homelab, a Docker swarm on a EC2 instance, but there's no longer a single web service in either of them. Workers is insanely good.
thinkafterbef 2 hours ago [-]
Finally proper stale-while-revalidate support!
dbbk 24 minutes ago [-]
That landed a few months ago
ignoramous 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Incredible! This is why I shoehorn all my server side usecases on to the Workers Platform. Cloudflare, since 2020 when I first went all-in, has consistently shipped features that reduce bills significantly (except for 2023 Workers usage model changes). In one case, when they shipped free Snippets (Workers but 32kb code size & 5s CPU time) for Pro accounts ($200/yr), our bills went from £15k+ to £0.
I know about the infamous "Enterprise plan" (especially, when your bandwidth is as high as ours in 100s of TBs) and know of at least one other tech shop that was required to pay for it ... but we haven't got that sales call, yet.
PUSH_AX 1 hours ago [-]
Our bandwidth is very high, we constantly get invited onto the call with their team, but after talking with them a few times it makes absolutely zero sense for us to have a committed spend, all the stuff I needed an account manager for in GCP/AWS just doesn't exist in CF. Support wise I imagine if it's broken for us it's also broken for 2 million other people so... yeah... Thanks CF!
davidmurdoch 2 hours ago [-]
The feature is great. The post itself is a slop grenade.
napsterbr 2 hours ago [-]
One of the recent AI tells other than em dash is the excessive usage of hyphenated words:
> multi-tenant-safe cache keys
> on a server-rendered app
> byte-for-byte identical (classic)
> gets a cache-speed response
> cached-file-extensions list
Honestly, this is terrible. I had to add a "use simple words only, don't hyphenate unnecessarily" warning to my Claude config. After a full day of work, having to read these Claudisms all the time make a noticeable difference on how tired you get. It gets even worse when Claude starts to make up its own vocabulary.
jesse_dot_id 25 seconds ago [-]
I have used em dashes extensively — for at least a decade — and I also generously apply hyphens when it makes sense to do so as well. You people are about as annoying as the grammar nazis on IRC in the '90s, except you're saying that prose is less readable because a large language model has been trained on nearly the sum total of human knowledge and found that em dashes are used extensively in the highest rated prose and therefore must be the correct choice to make.
Also, most engineers will likely just be skimming this article before feeding it into their harness to implement the changes anyway, so it makes sense for it to be more heavy on context than it would be if meant for only humans to consume.
topgrain2 2 hours ago [-]
Fuck, I spent all these years developing a thoughtful writing style that leaned toward clarity for the reader, even if it meant extra work to achieve precision, or adding affordances like “excessive” hyphenation, and now I guess have to learn to write worse.
tshaddox 54 minutes ago [-]
I think it’s exceedingly unlikely for a good-faith reader to mistake good-faith human writing for AI writing.
Even if you use em dashes and a few phrases that have become associated with AI writing, there’s still an unmistakeable sense of how much effort was put into the writing.
But I suppose there might be naive readers who don’t know how to spot this effort and would false positive on em dashes or supposed AI phrases.
napsterbr 2 hours ago [-]
There is a world of difference between well-written human text and sloppy walls of AI-generated text. There's nothing wrong in using hyphenations or emdashes -- I use them myself! That's not the point of my comment.
Xirdus 1 hours ago [-]
Whether we like it or not, em dashes are effectively verboten in online discussions and blog posts if you want people to take you seriously. If the idea that excessive hyphenation is an AI tell gains traction, it too will become impossible to use without ruining your credibility.
ignoramous 2 hours ago [-]
What does it mean when prompting SoTA LLMs prone to slop to be concise and precise, with respect to context at hand, not work at all? Anyone benchmarking that?
ambicapter 27 minutes ago [-]
Oh no, how will you write clearly without hyphens?
davidmurdoch 60 minutes ago [-]
Don't change. The homogenous way LLMs write is just tiresome and boring, like if every movie stared Ryan Reynolds - an actor famous for having no range. Ryan Reynolds is enjoyable to watch on occasion, but I don't want everything I watch to be Ryan Reynolds.
swiftcoder 1 hours ago [-]
It does feel a bit like the LLMs have commoditised correct writing form, and all the plebs are all up in arms about it...
CodesInChaos 1 hours ago [-]
I have an over-hyphenated writing-style as well. Probably my Germanness.
ambicapter 26 minutes ago [-]
There is not reason whatsoever to hyphenate "writing style".
nwatson 1 hours ago [-]
I opine that over-hyphenation adds clarity.
1 hours ago [-]
arikrahman 2 hours ago [-]
One of the earliest tells was the use of emdashes.
dan_sbl 2 hours ago [-]
Billion dollar company can't afford one human copywriter. The future is great! (edit: copyrighter -> copywriter)
davidmurdoch 2 hours ago [-]
They could just feed an llm a small corpus of past human authored posts from their site, and have the LLM rewrite it in a style matching style, and it would likely turn out pretty great.
jgrahamc 1 hours ago [-]
I've tried this with my own blog posts from blog.jgc.org and the result was... not good. It basically wrote something that read like a parody.
davidmurdoch 1 hours ago [-]
Ah, bummer. Not totally surprising though.
ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago [-]
Neither can you afford a copywriter, evidently?
CodesInChaos 2 hours ago [-]
Modern cloudflare in a nutshell.
lijok 2 hours ago [-]
Can you elaborate? I read it, found the concepts well explained, walked away better informed.
Responding to alleged slop with more slop doesn’t decrease the total amount of slop on the internet.
davidmurdoch 2 hours ago [-]
You think I'm using AI to leave comments like this on HN?
skrebbel 2 hours ago [-]
"slop" doesn't mean "AI generated content", it means bad content, a waste of the reader's time. Grantparent's implication is that your comment was bad content, not that it was AI generated bad content.
davidmurdoch 2 hours ago [-]
I was riffing off of the meaning from https://noslopgrenade.com/ which made its way around the comments here on HN a few weeks ago.
geraneum 2 hours ago [-]
Not the original commenter; but, at least for me, the idea is that when it’s written by humans we know that effort and care were put into communicating the news. Otherwise they could post a link to the docs and we could ask my flavor of LLM to summerize. No need for extra filler content. That why it’s slop and it’s different.
lijok 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t have access to my flavor of LLM on the train nor the time or budget to have it do the research and summary for me
Why are we all of a sudden pretending like pre-LLM era blogs were these pristinely well written pieces of art or even that effort and care was put into them? In most cases they were significantly less coherent and incomplete. Don’t get me started on the mess that was the communication of this particular company or one of their competitors like AWS.
davidmurdoch 52 minutes ago [-]
Because we add humans enjoy variety. I read for entertainment, even technical posts like this one that I have no use for. I often trying to think about what the author may have been thinking when writing, why they introduced concepts in a specific order, what ideas might they have omitted, etc. It's personal and enjoyable. But now, when I detect the familiar writing style of what seems to be a gpt 5 model, that "parasocial" connection dies.
The LLM explained the core concept and features very well. But it was dull and boring to me, as I already have to read this writing style at work pretty much all day every day.
geraneum 44 minutes ago [-]
>I don’t have access to my flavor of LLM on the train nor the time or budget to have it do the research and summary for me
Aren't you gonna let the LLM develop for you anyway? Why bother writing and reading a post at all?
> pretending like pre-LLM era blogs were these pristinely well written pieces of art
The point is the effort and care that the writer puts which differentiates it from automatically generated text. That matters because a human can sympathize and that leads to better understanding and greater connection. That's why a post is written.
> Don’t get me started on the mess that was the communication of this particular company or one of their competitors like AWS.
And we criticize those as well. Nothing's changed. Yesterday's bad content is today's slop (plus a mind boggling amount of investment, corruption and environmental side effects).
htsh 2 hours ago [-]
curious, how does one configure something like this for AWS Lambda? Appreciate it.
I am assuming it is a bunch of manual work.
baueric 1 hours ago [-]
Equivalent is probably putting AWS CloudFront in front of your lambda. Has edge caching with customizable config.
afavour 1 hours ago [-]
You use Cloudfront. Which you’re already doing anyway but yes, you do need to configure it.
coredog64 1 hours ago [-]
Technically, probably CloudFront.
hdz 1 hours ago [-]
Does anything beat a free static site hosted with Cloudflare workers at this point, performance wise?
nicce 1 hours ago [-]
Very difficult to beat if you don't process or store private information that should not be given to the US company.
adasq 2 hours ago [-]
now, waiting for opennext adapter maintainers to catchup with it
I was looking forward to the "why it took us this long" explanation but it wasn't explicitly spelled out. Any Cloudflare staff here able to expand on that?
(The article does a good job of showing how many different smart design decisions went into this, but given caching is core to what a Cloudflare does I'm still a little surprised it took 9 years to get here!)
On top of that the cache tags are a slick way to do invalidation. This looks like a great product.
- You still get billed per request, whether the request hits cache or not (but don't get billed for CPU time)
- You now get billed for static asset requests! This makes no sense to me. "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." Yeah that sounds like a bug that just happens to generate them more money.
- The cache key automatically has the worker deployment version, so even gradual deployments populate their own cache which is nice
- It seems like you can set a totally custom cache key? But that was previously Enterprise only, can't see if that's still the case here.
A big worry was always "why does workers sit in front of my cache? that's a waste of an invocation if i'm returning a cached result"
Thanks CF.
I know about the infamous "Enterprise plan" (especially, when your bandwidth is as high as ours in 100s of TBs) and know of at least one other tech shop that was required to pay for it ... but we haven't got that sales call, yet.
> multi-tenant-safe cache keys
> on a server-rendered app
> byte-for-byte identical (classic)
> gets a cache-speed response
> cached-file-extensions list
Honestly, this is terrible. I had to add a "use simple words only, don't hyphenate unnecessarily" warning to my Claude config. After a full day of work, having to read these Claudisms all the time make a noticeable difference on how tired you get. It gets even worse when Claude starts to make up its own vocabulary.
Also, most engineers will likely just be skimming this article before feeding it into their harness to implement the changes anyway, so it makes sense for it to be more heavy on context than it would be if meant for only humans to consume.
Even if you use em dashes and a few phrases that have become associated with AI writing, there’s still an unmistakeable sense of how much effort was put into the writing.
But I suppose there might be naive readers who don’t know how to spot this effort and would false positive on em dashes or supposed AI phrases.
Responding to alleged slop with more slop doesn’t decrease the total amount of slop on the internet.
Why are we all of a sudden pretending like pre-LLM era blogs were these pristinely well written pieces of art or even that effort and care was put into them? In most cases they were significantly less coherent and incomplete. Don’t get me started on the mess that was the communication of this particular company or one of their competitors like AWS.
The LLM explained the core concept and features very well. But it was dull and boring to me, as I already have to read this writing style at work pretty much all day every day.
Aren't you gonna let the LLM develop for you anyway? Why bother writing and reading a post at all?
> pretending like pre-LLM era blogs were these pristinely well written pieces of art
The point is the effort and care that the writer puts which differentiates it from automatically generated text. That matters because a human can sympathize and that leads to better understanding and greater connection. That's why a post is written.
> Don’t get me started on the mess that was the communication of this particular company or one of their competitors like AWS.
And we criticize those as well. Nothing's changed. Yesterday's bad content is today's slop (plus a mind boggling amount of investment, corruption and environmental side effects).
I am assuming it is a bunch of manual work.
it already uses Workers Cache for the route-level ISR cache
I just don’t understand why undermine your own announcements by delegating comms to the machine. It’s disrespectful to the reader.
I found it funny to just read through.