A global virtual private cloud for building secure cross-cloud apps on Cloudflare Workers

Today, we’re sharing a preview of a new feature that makes it easier to build cross-cloud apps: Workers VPC. 

Workers VPC is our take on the traditional virtual private cloud (VPC), modernized for a network and compute that isn’t tied to a single cloud region. And we’re complementing it with Workers VPC Private Links to make building across clouds easier. Together, they introduce two new capabilities to Workers:

1. A way to group your apps’ resources on Cloudflare into isolated environments, where only resources within a Workers VPC can access one another, allowing you to secure and segment app-to-app traffic (a “Workers VPC”).

2. A way to connect a Workers VPC to a legacy VPC in a public or private cloud, enabling your Cloudflare resources to access your resources in private networks and vice versa, as if they were in a single VPC (the “Workers VPC Private Link”).

^{Workers VPC and Workers VPC Private Link enable bidirectional connectivity between Cloudflare and external clouds}

When linked to an external VPC, Workers VPC makes the underlying resources directly addressable, so that application developers can think at the application layer, without dropping down to the network layer. Think of this like a unified VPC across clouds, with built-in service discovery.

We’re actively building Workers VPC on the foundation of our existing private networking products and expect to roll it out later in 2025. We wanted to share a preview of it early to get feedback and learn more about what you need. 

Developers are increasingly choosing Workers as their platform of choice, building rich, stateful applications on it. We’re way past Workers’ original edge use-cases: you’re modernizing more of your stack and moving more business logic on to Workers. You’re choosing Workers to build real-time collaboration applications that access your external databases, large scale applications that use your secured APIs, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that expose your business logic to agents as close to your end users as possible.

Now, you’re running into the final barrier holding you back in external clouds: the VPC. Virtual private clouds provide you with peace of mind and security, but they’ve been cleverly designed to deliberately add mile-high barriers to building your apps on Workers. That’s the unspoken, vested interest behind getting you to use more legacy VPCs: it’s yet another way that captivity clouds hold your data and apps hostage and lock you in. 

In conversation after conversation, you’ve told us “VPCs are a blocker”. We get it: your company policies mandate the VPC, and with good reason! So, to access private resources from Workers, you have to either 1) create new public APIs that perform authentication to provide secure access, or 2) set up and scale Cloudflare Tunnels and Zero Trust for each resource that you want to access. That’s a lot of hoops to jump through before you can even start building.

While we have the storage and compute options for you to build fully on Workers, we also understand that you won’t be moving your applications or your data overnight! But we think you should at least be free to choose Workers today to build modern applications, AI agents, and real-time global applications with your existing private APIs and databases. That’s why we’re building Workers VPC.

We’ve witnessed the pain of building around VPCs first hand. In 2024, we shipped support for private databases for Hyperdrive. This made it possible for you to connect to databases in an external VPC from Cloudflare Workers, using Cloudflare Tunnels as the underlying network solution. As a point-to-point solution, it’s been working great! But this solution has its limitations: managing and scaling a Cloudflare Tunnel for each resource in your external cloud isn’t sustainable for large, complex architectures. 

We want to provide a dead-simple solution for you to unlock access to external cloud resources, in a manner that scales as you modernize more of your workloads with Workers. And we’re leveraging the experience we have in building Magic WAN and Magic Cloud Networking to make that possible.

So, we’re taking VPCs global with Workers VPC. And we’re letting you connect them to your legacy private networks with Workers VPC Private Links. Because we think you should be free to build secure, global, cross-cloud apps on Workers. 

Private networks are complex to set up, they span across many layers of abstraction, and entire teams are needed to manage them. There are few things as complex as managing architectures that have outgrown their original point-to-point network! So we knew we needed to provide a simple solution for isolated environments on our platform.

Workers VPCs are, by definition, virtual private clouds. That means that they allow you to define isolated  environments of Workers and Developer Platform resources like R2, Workers KV, and D1 that have secure access to one another. Other resources in your Cloudflare account won’t have access to these — VPCs allow you to specify certain sets of resources that are associated with certain apps and ensure no cross-application access of resources happens.

Workers VPCs are the equivalent of the legacy VPC, re-envisioned for the Cloudflare Developer Platform. The main difference is how Workers VPCs are implemented under the hood: instead of being built on top of regional, IP-based networking, Workers VPCs are built for global scale with the Cloudflare network performing isolation of resources across all of its datacenters. 

And as you would expect from traditional VPCs, Workers VPCs have networking capabilities that allow them to seamlessly integrate with traditional networks, enabling you to build cross-cloud apps that never leave the networks you trust. That’s where Workers VPC Private Links comes in. 

Like AWS PrivateLink and other VPC-to-VPC approaches, Workers VPC Private Links connect your Workers VPC to your external cloud using either standard tunnels over IPsec or Cloudflare Network Interconnect. When a Private Link is established, resources from either side can access one another directly, with nothing exposed over the public Internet, as if they were a single, connected VPC.

^{Workers VPC Private Link automatically provisions a gateway for IPsec tunnels or Cloudflare Network Interconnect and configures DNS for routing to Cloudflare resources}

To make this possible, Workers VPC and Private Links work together to automatically provision and manage the resources in your external cloud. This establishes the connection between both networks and configures the resources required to make bidirectional routing possible. And, because we know some teams will want to maintain full responsibility over resource provisioning, Workers VPC Private Link can automatically provide you with Terraform scripts to provision external cloud resources that you can run yourself.

After the connection is made, Workers VPC will automatically detect the resources in your external VPC and make them available as bindings with unique IDs. Requests made through the Workers VPC resource binding will automatically be routed to your external VPC, where DNS resolution will occur (if you’re using hostname-accessed resources) and will be routed to the expected resource. 

For example, connecting from Cloudflare Workers to a private API in an external VPC is just a matter of calling fetch() on a binding to a named Workers VPC resource:

const response = await env.WORKERS_VPC_RESOURCE.fetch("/api/users/342");

Similarly, Cloudflare resources are accessible via a standardized URL that has been configured within a private DNS resource in your external cloud by Workers VPC Private Link. If you were attempting to access R2 objects from an API in your VPC, you would be able to make the request to the expected URL:

const response = await fetch("https://.r2.cloudflarestorage.com.cloudflare-workers-vpc.com");

Best of all, since Workers VPC is built on our existing platform, it takes full advantage of our networking and routing capabilities to reduce egress fees and let you build global apps.

First, by supporting Cloudflare Network Interconnect as the underlying connection method, Workers VPC Private Links can help you lower your bandwidth costs by taking advantage of discounted external cloud egress pricing. Second, since Workers VPC is global by nature, your Workers and resources can be placed wherever needed to ensure optimal performance. For instance, with Workers’ Smart Placement, you can ensure that your Workers are automatically placed in a region closest to your external, regional VPC to maximize app performance. 

Workers VPC unlocks huge swaths of your workloads that are currently locked into external clouds, without requiring you to expose those private resources to the public Internet to build on Workers. Here are real examples of applications that you’ve told us you’re looking forward to build on Workers with Workers VPC:

^{Sample architecture of real-time canvas application built on Workers and Durable Objects accessing a private database and container in an external VPC}

Let’s say you’re trying to build a new feature for your application on Workers. You also want to add real-time collaboration to your app using Durable Objects. And you’re using Containers as well because you need to access FFmpeg for live video processing. In each scenario, you need a way to persist the state updates in your existing traditional database and access your existing APIs.

While in the past, you might have had to create a separate API just to handle update operations from Workers and Durable Objects, you can now directly access the traditional database and update the value directly with Workers VPC. 

Same thing goes for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers! If you’re building an MCP server on Workers, you may want to expose certain functionality that isn’t immediately available as a public API, especially if time to market is important. With Workers VPC, you can create new functionality directly in your MCP server that builds upon your private APIs or databases, enabling you to ship quickly and securely. 

^{Sample architecture of external cloud resources accessing data from R2, D1, KV}

Lots of development teams are landing more and more data on the Cloudflare Developer Platform, whether it is storing AI training data on R2 due to its zero-egress cost efficiency, application data in D1 with its horizontal sharding model, or configuration data in KV for its global single-digit millisecond read latencies. 

Now, you need to provide a way to use the training data in R2 from your compute in your external cloud to train or fine-tune LLM models. Since you’re accessing user data, you need to use a private network because it’s mandated by your security teams. Likewise, you need to access user data and configuration data in D1 and KV for certain administrative or analytical tasks and you want to do so while avoiding the public Internet. Workers VPC enables direct, private routing from your external VPC to Cloudflare resources, with easily accessible hostnames from the automatically configured private DNS.

Finally, let’s use an AI agents example — it’s Developer Week 2025 after all! This AI agent is built on Workers, and uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to improve the results of its generated text while minimizing the context window. 

You’re using PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch in your external cloud because that’s where your data currently resides and you’re a fan of pgvector. You’ve decided to use Workers because you want to get to market quickly, and now you need to access your database. Your database is, once again, placed in a private network and is inaccessible from the public Internet. 

While you could provision a new Hyperdrive and Cloudflare Tunnel in a container, since your Workers VPC is already set up and linked, you can access the database directly using either Workers or Hyperdrive. 

And what if new documents get added to your object storage in your external cloud? You might want to kick off a workflow to process the new document, chunk it, get embeddings for it, and update the state of your application in consequence, all while providing real-time updates to your end users about the status of the workflow? 

Well, in that case, you can use Workflows, triggered by a serverless function in the external cloud. The Workflow will then fetch the new document in object storage, process it as needed, use your preferred embedding provider (whether Workers AI or another provider) in order to process and update the vector stores in Postgres, and then update the state of your application. 

These are just some of the workloads that we know will benefit from Workers VPC on day 1. We’re excited to see what you build and are looking forward to working with you to make global VPCs real. 

We’re incredibly excited for you to be able to build more on Workers with Workers VPC. We believe that private access to your APIs and databases in your private networks will redefine what you can build on Workers. Workers VPCs unlock access to your private resources to let your ship faster, more performant apps on Workers. And we’re obviously going to ensure that Containers integrate natively with Workers VPC.

We’re actively building Workers VPC on the networking primitives and on-ramps we’ve been using to connect customer networks at scale, and our goal is to ship an early preview later in 2025.

We’re planning to tackle connectivity from Workers to external clouds first, enabling you to modernize more apps that need access to private APIs and databases with Workers, before expanding to support full-directional traffic flows and multiple Workers VPC networks. If you want to shape the vision of Workers VPC and have workloads trapped in a legacy cloud, express interest here.