What is Workers KV Instant?

Cloudflare introduced a new mode for its popular key-value store Workers KV: Workers KV Instant. It runs on Quicksilver, the infrastructure the company has used internally since 2020 but never made available to customers until now.

What it delivers

According to Cloudflare, KV Instant offers over 100x faster reads than classic mode. p99 read latency drops below 2 milliseconds, while p95 times are measured in microseconds. Writes are pushed to edge locations over 20x faster, with 99% of writes replicating in around 250 milliseconds.

API and differences

KV Instant uses the existing Workers KV API: get(), put(), list() and delete(). There are three key differences:

  • You must pass the "mode": "instant" attribute when creating a namespace.
  • Metadata is not supported; getWithMetadata always returns null.
  • list returns all matching keys without pagination.

Pricing

Reads cost 60% less than classic Workers KV. In contrast, storage and Class A operations are significantly more expensive. Cloudflare recommends KV Instant for infrequently updated but frequently read configuration data.