Cloudflare Unveils Pingora: Rust-Based HTTP Proxy Replacing NGINX

ArticleYuchen Wu and Andrew HauckAnnouncement

Cloudflare has developed Pingora, an in-house HTTP proxy written in Rust that replaces its previous NGINX infrastructure. The system serves over one trillion requests per day while using only one-third of the CPU and memory resources of the legacy stack.

Key points

  1. Pingora was built in-house using Rust to proxy traffic between Cloudflare's network and Internet origin servers.
  2. The proxy handles over one trillion requests daily across services including CDN, Workers fetch, Tunnel, Stream, and R2.
  3. Pingora requires only a third of the CPU and memory resources used by Cloudflare's previous proxy infrastructure.
  4. NGINX was replaced due to architectural scaling limits, specifically uneven CPU core loading caused by request-to-worker pinning.
  5. NGINX connection pools are scoped per worker process, which limited connection reuse and degraded TTFB due to redundant TCP and TLS handshakes.

Why it matters

At massive network scales, traditional multi-process proxy architectures encounter severe efficiency bottlenecks in connection reuse. Adopting Rust for custom proxy architecture demonstrates how modern memory-safe systems programming can substantially cut hardware requirements while reducing latency through shared connection pooling.

Analysis

The article highlights specific operational limitations encountered with NGINX at global scale. Because NGINX pins requests to individual worker processes, connection pools cannot be easily shared across workers, forcing repetitive TCP and TLS handshakes to origins and worsening TTFB. Additionally, heavy CPU or blocking I/O operations inside a worker degrade sibling requests on that process. By building Pingora in Rust, Cloudflare overcame these concurrency and pooling bottlenecks while drastically lowering operational resource footprints.

Mentioned links

Found in

Summary generated by AI (Gemini 3.8 Flash, 27 September 2026). It may contain errors – the original source is authoritative.

Related entries

Similar in content, found by the AI search.

  • Repository:cloudflare/pingora

    Cloudflare Pingora: Async Rust Framework for Network Services and Proxies

    Pingora is an open-source Rust framework developed by Cloudflare to build programmable, reliable, and high-performance networked systems and HTTP proxies. Serving as a memory-safe alternative to traditional C/C++ solutions, it has handled over 40 million requests per second in Cloudflare's production environment for years.

    27.3kstarsRust

    Security· Tool

  • X post:Elia

    Field Report: Why Cloudflare Stands Out as an All-in-One Platform

    Developer Elia shares his hands-on experience using Cloudflare across side projects and enterprise work. Moving away from on-prem infrastructure and Vercel, he highlights the benefits of Cloudflare Workers, R2, D1, and integrated security tooling.

    148bookmarks31.2kviews

    Web development· Opinion

  • Repository:emmett-framework/granian

    Granian: A Rust HTTP Server for Python Applications

    Granian is a high-performance HTTP server for Python applications built in Rust using Hyper and Tokio. It supports ASGI, WSGI, and RSGI interfaces, aiming to replace complex dependency stacks like Gunicorn plus Uvicorn with a single, fast binary package.

    5.6kstarsRust

    Web development· Tool

  • Repository:coollabsio/coolify

    Coolify: Open-source PaaS alternative for self-hosted cloud deployments

    Coolify is an open-source, self-hostable Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) under the Apache 2.0 licence, designed as an alternative to Vercel, Heroku, and Netlify. It allows users to deploy web apps, static sites, databases, and over 280 one-click services onto their own servers via SSH.

    61.4kstarsPHP

    Web development· Tool

  • Repository:tursodatabase/turso

    Turso: Rust-Powered SQLite-Compatible In-Process SQL Database

    Turso is an open-source in-process SQL database written in Rust that provides SQLite compatibility and an experimental Postgres frontend. Dubbed the 'LLVM of databases', it compiles SQL into bytecode executed by an internal virtual machine.

    24.2kstarsRust

    Web development· Tool

Back to the knowledge base

Let's talk about your project

Get in touch

Locations

  • Mattersburg
    Johann Nepomuk Bergerstraße 7/2/14
    7210 Mattersburg, Austria
  • Vienna
    Ungargasse 64-66/3/404
    1030 Wien, Austria

Parts of this content were created with the assistance of AI.