Edge-First Architecture
Forget regions. Forget availability zones. Run your code, your data, and your state within 50 milliseconds of every human on the planet.
The Old World
A user in Edinburgh hits your app. The request travels to London (your AWS region). Your ECS container wakes up. It queries RDS. It caches in ElastiCache. It returns JSON. The browser boots React, parses it, diffs the virtual DOM, patches the real DOM. Total time: 800ms for a "hello world."
The fundamental insight: Cloudflare has ~330 data centres worldwide. Every single one can run your code. Every single one can run SQLite. The "edge" isn't a concept — it's a physically distributed computer the size of the planet.
The Stack
Workers
Your code. V8 isolates, not containers. Cold start <5ms. Runs in every PoP globally.
D1
SQLite at the edge. Read-optimized replicas in every PoP. Full SQL, not a NoSQL subset.
Durable Objects
Stateful singletons with their own SQLite database. WebSocket sessions, agent state, real-time coordination.
R2
S3-compatible storage. Zero egress fees. Store once, serve from the edge.
Workers AI
Run ML models at the edge. LLMs, embeddings, image classification — same V8 isolate as your app code.
The Cost Advantage
| Component | AWS | Cloudflare |
|---|---|---|
| Compute | EC2: $15/mo | Workers: $0 (free tier) |
| Database | RDS: $15/mo | D1: $0 (free tier) |
| CDN | CloudFront: $5–50/mo | Built in |
| Storage | S3: $0.23/GB + egress | R2: $0.015/GB, zero egress |
| Total | ~$50–100/mo | ~$0–5/mo |
Further Reading
- Free The Web — the hypermedia principles
- Why HTML Wins — HTML vs JSON
- The Surfable Web — putting it all together