Building with Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers let you run JavaScript at the edge — close to your users, with near-zero cold starts. Combined with Hono, a lightweight web framework, you get an incredibly productive setup for building APIs.

Why Workers?

1. Global by default — code runs in 300+ data centres worldwide.
2. No cold starts — V8 isolates spin up in under 5 ms.
3. Free tier — 100k requests/day at zero cost.

Getting Started

npm create cloudflare@latest my-api -- --template hono

A Minimal Hono Route

import { Hono } from "hono";

const app = new Hono();

app.get("/health", (c) => c.json({ status: "ok" }));

export default app;

Key Patterns

• KV for caching — persist data at the edge with Workers KV.
• D1 for SQL — a serverless SQLite database built into the Workers ecosystem.
• Durable Objects — stateful, single-instance actors for real-time features.

Final Thoughts

Workers are the fastest path from idea to production API I've used. If you haven't tried them yet, start with Hono — it feels like Express but runs everywhere.