● Covered by 1 source · 1 reportMedium impact1 neutral
Cloudflare releases Quicksilver as Workers KV Instant, offering faster reads with new limits
Key points
- Quicksilver now available as Workers KV Instant mode.
- 99th percentile reads are 1.62 ms, faster than classic KV.
- Namespace limited to 10,000 key-value pairs and 1 MB total.
- Writes capped at one per namespace per second.
- Higher costs for writes and storage compared to classic KV.
Quicksilver Now Customer-Facing
Cloudflare has released Quicksilver, its internal configuration store, to customers as Workers KV Instant. Quicksilver has been used internally since 2020 to handle key lookups for nearly every request to Cloudflare's network. This marks the first time the technology is directly accessible to external users.
Performance Improvements
Workers KV Instant offers a significant performance increase for read operations. The 99th percentile read latency is reported at 1.62 milliseconds across over 300 edge locations, a substantial improvement over the 287 milliseconds for classic Workers KV. This speed is achieved by instantly updating keys across Cloudflare's entire network.
New API and Limitations
The API for KV Instant is largely consistent with Workers KV, with a few key differences. Users must set a "mode": "instant" attribute during namespace creation, which cannot be changed later. Metadata is not supported, and the list operation returns all matching keys without pagination. These changes require developers to adapt their usage patterns.
KV Instant introduces specific limits: a namespace can hold a maximum of 10,000 key-value pairs and a total of one megabyte of data, with individual keys up to 300 bytes. Write operations are capped at one per namespace per second, a change from classic KV's one write per key per second. This design aims to simplify reasoning about update order but requires a different approach for concurrent writes.
Pricing Structure
The pricing model for Workers KV Instant reflects its specialized nature. While reads are 60% cheaper, storage and Class A operations are significantly more expensive than classic Workers KV. A single write costs ten cents, compared to five dollars per million in classic mode. Storage is priced at $100 per megabyte per month, meaning a full 1 MB namespace incurs a $100 monthly storage fee. Multi-key reads are billed per key, so requesting three keys counts as three Class B operations.
✨ This summary was generated by AI from the outlets' reporting listed below. It is not independently verified and may contain errors — check the original sources. How BrevFeed works →
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Reporting from
Cloudflare has made its internal Quicksilver key-value store available to customers as Workers KV Instant, a new mode for Workers KV. This new mode offers significantly faster read times, with 99th percentile reads resolving in 1.62 ms, compared to 287 ms for classic KV. However, it introduces new limitations on storage size, key-value pairs, write rates, and higher costs for writes and storage.