How we could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora
Cloudflare has prototyped the integration of Zstandard (zstd) compression within its Pingora-based cache architecture. This implementation aims to increase effective cache storage capacity on existing hardware by compressing cached objects.
Verified State Diff
Impact & Verification Analysis
Cloudflare enterprise customers and users relying on Cloudflare's CDN cache performance.
This architectural shift allows for higher cache hit ratios and improved storage efficiency, reducing infrastructure costs while maintaining or improving delivery speeds for end-users.
Full Fact Overview
Cloudflare is leveraging the Zstandard compression algorithm to optimize its cache layer, which is built on the Pingora proxy framework. By applying zstd compression to cached assets, the company aims to reduce the physical storage footprint required for cache, effectively increasing the total amount of content that can be stored on existing infrastructure without additional hardware investment. This approach focuses on balancing compression ratios with CPU overhead to maintain low latency for cache hits.