Best of Cloudflare — March 2026

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    Article
    Avatar of kentcdoddsKent C. Dodds·11w

    Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare

    Kent C. Dodds shares how a long podcast episode caused his Fly.io primary server to hit 400-500% CPU load, forcing him to offload FFmpeg processing to Cloudflare Queues and Containers. The new architecture enqueues a job from the app, a Cloudflare Worker forwards it to a Container that runs FFmpeg, uploads results to R2, and POSTs a signed HMAC-SHA256 callback to the app. The post covers the before/after metrics (85% reduction in peak load), cost tradeoffs between Cloudflare and a dedicated Fly.io machine, and several implementation mistakes caught after the initial PR: a counterproductive local fallback, container lifecycle issues with sleepAfter, and a queue worker that blocked for the full transcode duration. The conclusion reinforces a 'start simple, iterate when reality demands it' philosophy.

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    Article
    Avatar of kentcdoddsKent C. Dodds·11w

    Simplifying Containers with Cloudflare Sandboxes

    Kent C. Dodds shares how he replaced a Cloudflare Container-based FFmpeg audio pipeline with Cloudflare Sandboxes, eliminating heartbeat/shutdown coordination plumbing. The new design uses a one-shot sandbox.exec() call directly from the queue worker, keeping R2 credentials in the worker and passing only presigned URLs to the sandbox. The sandbox image is minimal: base Cloudflare sandbox image plus FFmpeg and a shell script. Two production bugs surfaced post-merge — a sandbox ID length limit (63 chars max) and a broken Dockerfile that replaced the required Cloudflare sandbox runtime with a plain Debian base. Both were diagnosed and fixed with help from a Cursor agent and the Cloudflare MCP server. The entire migration, including two PR iterations, took under an hour of the author's own time.

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    Video
    Avatar of fireshipFireship·12w

    Cloudflare just slop forked Next.js…

    Cloudflare released VNext, a from-scratch reimplementation of the Next.js API built on Vite, enabling Next.js apps to be deployed anywhere without relying on Vercel's proprietary runtime. Built in roughly a week using AI assistance at a cost of ~$1,100 in tokens, it achieves 94% Next.js API coverage. Benchmarks show up to 4.4x faster production builds and 57% smaller client bundles compared to standard Next.js, largely due to Vite and the Rust-based Rolldown bundler. Vercel's leadership publicly criticized the project as a 'slop fork' and highlighted security vulnerabilities. A practical migration demo is shown using Cursor and a Cloudflare-provided agent skill, though the project is considered too early for production use.

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