Cloudflare Workers and Containers now support inbound TCP connections and gRPC
Curated from Cloudflare Blog
For years, platform engineers have faced a frustrating dichotomy: run stateful, long-lived TCP workloads on bare metal or heavy containers, or use serverless for stateless HTTP requests. Cloudflare’s recent update to Workers and Containers breaks this rigid boundary by enabling inbound TCP and gRPC support via Spectrum. This shift allows teams to deploy complex, full-duplex services directly on the edge without sacrificing the operational simplicity of a managed platform. It is particularly relevant for teams managing microservices that rely on gRPC for internal communication, as it eliminates the need for separate load balancers or dedicated ingress controllers for these protocols. The ability to run gRPC-to-gRPC-web translation natively further reduces client-side complexity. While this expands the edge computing use case beyond simple API gateways, practitioners should carefully evaluate latency implications and cold start behaviors for connection-heavy workloads. Start by isolating a single gRPC service in a test environment to measure performance before committing to a broader architectural migration.
Cloudflare Workers now support inbound TCP connections via Spectrum, allowing direct socket forwarding to Durable Objects and Containers. Developers can run full-duplex gRPC applications or leverage automatic gRPC-to-gRPC-web translation directly within Workers.
— Cloudflare Blog