Cloudflare Launches Public Beta for Container Service

2025-06-29

Cloudflare announces public beta of its new container service enabling developers to run containers on their global network. The service allows deployment of Docker containers to handle workloads challenging for the serverless computing platform Workers, such as edge media processing and data-intensive tasks at the network edge. According to official documentation, the container service is tightly integrated with Workers and built upon Durable Objects - Cloudflare's modular components for stateful applications and distributed systems. This service empowers users to run resource-intensive applications requiring parallel CPU cores, applications needing full file systems or specific runtime environments, and existing applications distributed as container images. In a recent technical article, Cloudflare product manager Mike Nomitch and software engineer Gabi Villalonga Simón explained how the containers function across various use cases including API gateways, service meshes, and orchestrators: "Not only do Durable Objects provide fine-grained control over container lifecycles, but the entire Workers platform enables you to scale routing and scheduling behavior as needed. Workers deliver programmable entry logic from over 300 global locations, offering gateway-like functionality." When standard Workers capabilities fall short, containers can execute user-generated code in any language, run CLI tools requiring full Linux environments, or migrate applications from other providers without major rewrites. As the engineers clarified: "Container routing is enabled through underlying mechanisms where each Durable Object acts as a programmable sidecar proxying requests to containers while managing their lifecycle. This approach offers unprecedented control and scalability that would be difficult to achieve on other platforms." Cloudflare reports some customers are already operating thousands of containers, though the beta limits users to 40 GiB total memory and 40 vCPU concurrent instances. Reddit community feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Mehmet Özgür Ersoy, director at modbe, tested gateway architectures for NestJS and Next.js on the new platform and wrote: "Combining the familiar Docker container ecosystem with Cloudflare's 'simple, global, and programmable' computing vision opens exciting new possibilities. I'm eager to see how this technology will reshape our understanding of serverless architectures." Several features remain unavailable in the beta including global auto-scaling and latency-aware routing. The engineering team plans to expand container-Worker communication options, stating: "We'll add more ways to connect your Workers with containers and vice versa. We'll introduce an exec command for shell operations on instances and HTTP request handlers for container-to-Worker communications. This will make it easier to extend containers through the full developer platform, connect containers programmatically, and configure each container instance." Currently, three instance sizes (Development, Basic, and Standard) are available, billed per 10 milliseconds of active runtime. Pricing varies based on memory, disk, and CPU utilization, with charges commencing when requests are sent to containers or instances are manually activated. The public beta of Cloudflare's container service is available to all paid plan developers with a free tier included.