Building Cloudflare on Cloudflare

This post details the migration of core Cloudflare services, previously built on NGINX and Lua, to the Cloudflare Workers platform. It explains the architectural shift from a chain of HTTP proxies to a more integrated system leveraging Workers for Front Line (FL) processing. Key motivations include reducing latency overhead, improving developer experience, and enabling isolated deployments. The post outlines the evolution from initial internal worker integrations to the 'Flame' prototype and the subsequent improvements to the developer platform to support internal services, including access to internal services, request logging, state caching, and direct origin requests. It highlights the benefits of using the same tooling as customer-facing Workers and the challenges overcome in enabling internal services to leverage the Workers runtime.