The open beta launch is scheduled for June 2025 and promises a global, scalable, and programmable platform for running containers with native integration into Workers and Durable Objects.
Cloudflare has unveiled one of the most anticipated announcements of its Developer Week 2025: the arrival of containers in Cloudflare Workers. The company will launch this new feature in open beta by the end of June, allowing developers to run applications in containers from its global network without the usual complexity of platforms like Kubernetes.
Cloudflare Containers is built around three fundamental pillars: simplicity, scalability, and global deployment. By deeply integrating with Workers and Durable Objects, containers enable heavy workloads, portability between platforms, and fine-grained control over application lifecycle, all without having to manage complex infrastructure.
A frictionless platform for modern workloads
Containers in Workers are designed to address the increasing needs of modern development: running code generated by language models (LLMs), using CLI tools that require a full Linux environment, managing large volumes of memory and CPU, or migrating applications from AWS, GCP, or Azure without complex rewrites.
Highlighted use cases include running AI-generated code in containers isolated by user session, ensuring security and state persistence. On the other end, Cloudflare has also shown stateless examples such as converting videos to GIFs using FFmpeg, taking advantage of autoscaling and the global deployment of its network.
“With just a few commands and lines of configuration, a complete service can be deployed without worrying about provisioning regions, load balancers, or network configuration,” emphasized project leads Mike Nomitch and Gabi Villalonga Simón.
Durable Objects: the key to custom programming
The engine that enables this flexibility is the integration with Durable Objects, which act as “programmable sidecars” for containers. This allows for advanced control patterns, such as manually starting or stopping containers, running scripts inside them, monitoring their state, and reacting in real time to failures or events.
Moreover, containers can easily integrate with other tools in the Cloudflare ecosystem, such as Workflows—used for orchestrating durable jobs like file compression with zstd—or the new Agents, which allow AI agents to execute commands within a container using Terraform.
Uncompromised security and performance
The architecture ensures that containers are isolated by default, accessible only through Workers and secured with end-to-end encryption. Even when a container needs to make external calls, they can be securely channeled through Workers, avoiding direct exposure to the internet.
Cloudflare also supports WebSocket connections and encrypted traffic without the need for TLS certificates within containers, as this is fully managed by the company’s network.
Competitive pricing and significant savings compared to other platforms
In terms of costs, Cloudflare offers a clear and efficient structure: you only pay for the active time of the container, billed in 10-millisecond intervals. The announced rates are $0.000020 per second of vCPU, $0.0000025 per GB-second of memory, and $0.00000007 per GB-second of disk. Additionally, 1 TB of monthly transfer is included for free.
A real comparison conducted by Cloudflare against Google Cloud Run shows that for an application with 50 million requests per month, combining containers and serverless functions, the monthly cost would be $28.33 on Cloudflare compared to $35.19 on Google’s platform.
Heading toward June 2025: a cohesive platform for complete applications
With this launch, Cloudflare reinforces its strategy of offering a unified platform, where containers are not an isolated product but a natural extension of the Workers ecosystem. The integration between serverless functions, orchestration, storage, and networking allows developers to choose the appropriate compute type for each task with minimal friction.
The announcement marks a significant step in Cloudflare’s evolution as a platform for building next-generation applications, particularly those that combine artificial intelligence, distributed business logic, and low-latency requirements at a global scale.
Registration for the open beta of Containers in Cloudflare Workers will be available in the coming weeks, with the promise of facilitating the development of complex, efficient, and secure applications from anywhere in the world.
Source: Cloudflare