April 7–11, 2025 marked Cloudflare’s Developer Week — a major event unveiling new tools, platform expansions, and forward-looking features designed to help developers build secure, scalable, and performant applications. From serverless enhancements to real-time media APIs and AI integrations, Cloudflare reinforced its goal of becoming the unified platform for the modern full-stack developer.
Workers, Workflows, Durable Objects
Cloudflare significantly enhanced its Workers platform to support full-stack development. Developers can now host both frontend and backend assets within a single Worker, with support for major frameworks like React Router, Astro, Hono, Vue, Nuxt, and Svelte. Deeper Vite integration and the new OpenNext adapter for Next.js apps bring seamless local-to-global development workflows.
Workflows reached general availability, offering long-running, durable, multi-step tasks natively within Workers. These workflows can even include human-in-the-loop actions with features like waitForEvent
, and integrate tightly with Workers AI and durable agents.
Durable Objects received an upgrade with broader support and automatic hibernation for cost efficiency. Observability was also a big focus: Cloudflare now offers unified logs, metrics, and query builders in one place through Workers Observability, helping developers monitor, debug, and scale their apps more effectively.
References:
Full-stack development
Workers VPC
Workflows GA
Deploy in seconds
Workers Observability
Snippets
Database (D1)
Cloudflare’s D1 database now supports global read replication in public beta, offering low-latency access to data with sequential consistency via a new Sessions API. This allows applications to “read their own writes” even with distributed replicas, a major milestone for geo-distributed apps.
The acquisition of Outerbase further boosts the developer experience for working with D1. Developers will soon benefit from a new, intuitive dashboard for managing and querying data, with automatic APIs, live query previews, and row-level security.
Cloudflare also launched the public beta of the R2 Data Catalog, which turns R2 into a managed Apache Iceberg catalog for analytics-ready object storage, offering zero egress fees and integration with Spark, Snowflake, and PyIceberg.
References:
D1 Read Replication
Outerbase acquisition
R2 Data Catalog
AI
Workers AI saw substantial performance boosts, including speculative decoding and prefix caching, which can double or quadruple inference speed for LLMs like Llama 3. An asynchronous batch API was also introduced, allowing developers to run large inference workloads more efficiently. New tools for LoRA-based fine-tuning and a revamped AI dashboard help developers better optimize their costs and performance.
AutoRAG, a fully managed Retrieval-Augmented Generation system, was unveiled. It automatically ingests and indexes documents from sources like R2, performs chunking and embedding, and lets developers easily build semantic search or AI assistants without managing vector databases or pipelines.
Cloudflare also enhanced support for AI agents, allowing deeper authentication/authorization, state management via Durable Objects, and integration with Workflows. The new Agents SDK and public APIs make it easier to build sophisticated, context-aware agents directly on Workers.
References:
Workers AI improvements
AutoRAG
Building AI Agents
Realtime
Cloudflare announced RealtimeKit and Cloudflare Realtime, a powerful new stack for building live audio, video, and AI-driven apps. The platform abstracts away the complexity of WebRTC with prebuilt SDKs for iOS, Android, Web, React Native, and more. Developers get bundled access to core media infrastructure like SFUs, STUN/TURN, and can layer on server-side features like transcription and recording. This move follows Cloudflare’s acquisition of Dyte, whose technology is now integrated.
Reference:
Cloudflare Realtime & RealtimeKit
Secrets and Containers: A New Foundation
One of the most significant foundational announcements this year was the Cloudflare Secrets Store, now in public beta. This lets developers centrally manage API keys, tokens, and credentials securely. Secrets are encrypted at rest using a dual-layer key hierarchy and integrated directly into Workers via bindings. Developers can also set role-based access controls and track usage via audit logs. This resolves a longstanding pain point by removing insecure environment variables and scattered secrets management, finally bringing a first-class secret solution into Cloudflare’s developer stack.
Even more transformative is the upcoming launch of Cloudflare Containers in June 2025. This marks a major expansion of Cloudflare’s compute model. Developers will be able to deploy containers with full Linux support, multiple cores, and gigabytes of memory, orchestrated through the same Workers interface and infrastructure. These containers are ephemeral, spin up on demand, and can be used for workloads not suited for the V8-based Workers runtime — such as machine learning, media processing, or custom binaries. Together with Workers, containers unlock hybrid applications where serverless and traditional compute models work in concert.
References:
Secrets Store
Cloudflare Containers
Everything Else
The Super Slurper tool for migrating data from S3 to R2 was rebuilt using Workers, Queues, and Durable Objects, resulting in 5x faster transfer speeds. Cloudflare also unveiled Pipelines, a new product for real-time stream ingestion to R2, enabled by their acquisition of Arroyo, a distributed streaming engine.
Cloudflare’s global performance continues to improve. They are now the fastest network in 48% of the top 1,000 ISPs worldwide, driven by last-mile partnerships and continued infrastructure expansion.
References:
Super Slurper upgrade
Pipelines + Arroyo
Network performance update
Conclusion
Developer Week 2025 demonstrated Cloudflare’s evolution into a fully integrated development platform — not just for edge functions, but for data, AI, real-time apps, containers, and more. Cloudflare is betting big on simplicity and scale: offering tools that abstract away complexity while providing powerful primitives under the hood. With these announcements, developers can build faster, ship globally, and do so with more confidence than ever.