Cloudflare Workers Complete Guide
How to plan edge applications with Cloudflare Workers, D1, R2, KV, caching, and API deployment.
Planning checklist
- Decide which routes need edge execution.
- Choose D1, KV, R2, or external APIs based on data shape.
- Design caching before production traffic arrives.
- Keep local and remote bindings documented separately.
Where Workers fit best
Cloudflare Workers are strongest for public APIs, edge middleware, content APIs, webhooks, analytics ingestion, and cache-aware services that benefit from global latency. They are not a drop-in replacement for every Node.js workload, so compatibility should be checked early.
For agency and SaaS projects, Workers pair well with Next.js frontends because the public site and API can both live close to users.
Choosing the storage layer
- D1 works for relational data, leads, CMS sync tables, and lightweight app records.
- KV works for cache entries, rate limits, feature flags, and lookup data.
- R2 works for user uploads, generated assets, and media that should avoid egress fees.
Most production systems use more than one binding. The important part is documenting which binding owns each data type.
Deployment checklist
Before deploying, confirm wrangler configuration, account-level resource limits, secrets, CORS rules, migrations, cache invalidation, and local development variables. Run local Worker checks and verify production resources separately because local success does not create remote D1 or R2 resources.