Cloudflare Workers and Containers now support inbound TCP connections and gRPC

Cloudflare announced two routes for running gRPC services, which let applications exchange structured requests and responses. For applications needing both sides to stream messages over one connection, its private beta routes incoming TCP connections through Spectrum, a Worker and a Durable Object to a server in a container. That provides the full bidirectional communication used by applications such as voice assistants. Announcement.

Simpler services can run directly in Workers using gRPC-web, with Cloudflare translating traffic to and from ordinary gRPC. The announced Worker path supports individual request-response calls and server streaming; the container path supplies full bidirectional streaming. That distinction determines which execution environment fits an existing gRPC application. Supported paths.

“And so as part of Agents Week, we’re extending Workers in the other direction, supporting inbound TCP connections and adding new ways to run gRPC applications on Cloudflare.”

“With this, there’s pretty much no gRPC-based application that you can’t deploy to Cloudflare, no matter what language it’s in or dependencies it relies on.”

“We translate incoming gRPC to gRPC-web, and translate outgoing gRPC-web to gRPC.”

“This lets you take advantage of Cloudflare’s network of 330+ locations and handle requests much closer to clients than is possible elsewhere.”