How we could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora
Curated from Cloudflare Blog
Cloudflare’s latest deep dive tackles a persistent infrastructure headache: cache capacity limits. By integrating Zstandard compression directly into Pingora, their edge proxy, they demonstrate how significant storage gains are possible without expanding physical hardware. This is critical for anyone managing high-traffic CDNs or edge networks, where disk I/O and capacity often dictate scaling costs. The article moves beyond theoretical benchmarks, detailing the practical trade-offs between compression ratios and CPU overhead in real-time traffic. For SREs and architects, this is a rare look at the internal mechanics of a major edge provider optimizing for efficiency. The key takeaway is that modern compression algorithms like Zstandard can fundamentally alter your capacity planning models, allowing you to squeeze more value from existing infrastructure before considering expensive hardware upgrades.
Could we get more cache space with the same hardware? We prototyped compression inside Cloudflare's cache to find out.
— Cloudflare Blog