Why We Chose Cloudflare Workers Over Traditional Servers
Edge computing isn't just a buzzword. Here's how moving to Workers cut our P99 latency by 80% while simplifying deployment.
When we started building the download infrastructure for our marketplace, the obvious choice was a traditional Node.js server on a VPS. But after benchmarking, we realized the latency tax of routing everything through a single region was unacceptable for a global audience.
The Problem
Our users are distributed across 30+ countries. A server in Frankfurt means 200ms+ round trips for users in Southeast Asia or South America. For something as latency-sensitive as generating signed download URLs, that matters.
Why Workers Won
Cloudflare Workers run on every edge node — 300+ data centers worldwide. Our download endpoint now responds in under 50ms for 95% of users, regardless of location. But performance wasn't the only factor:
- Zero cold starts — V8 isolates spin up in under 5ms
- Native D1 integration — SQLite at the edge for entitlement checks
- R2 signed URLs — Generate presigned links without egress fees
- Deployment simplicity —
wrangler deployand done
The Numbers
After migration:
- P99 latency: 420ms → 82ms (80% reduction)
- P50 latency: 180ms → 28ms
- Monthly cost: $45/mo → $5/mo (Workers free tier covers most of our traffic)
- Deploy time: 3 min (Docker build + push) → 8 seconds
Trade-offs
Workers aren't perfect for everything. The 128MB memory limit and 30s CPU time cap mean compute-heavy tasks still need traditional infrastructure. But for our use case — auth validation, database lookups, and URL signing — it's the right tool.
We're now running both our Download Worker and Payment Worker on the edge, handling thousands of requests daily with zero maintenance overhead.