{"slug": "cloudflare-containers", "name": "Cloudflare Containers", "category": "infra", "category_name": "Infrastructure and DevOps", "description": "", "recommenders": 4, "commenters": 9, "warners": 1, "score": 3.513, "rising": -1.31, "first": "2025-11-24", "latest": "2026-06-20", "why": "for bursty, infrequent workloads that already use R2 for storage, Containers are a natural fit.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 4, "compare": 0, "warn": 1}, "spark": [1, 1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "for bursty, infrequent workloads that already use R2 for storage, Containers are a natural fit.", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "cloudflare.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Cloudflare Containers"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 758123072, "item_id": 47382692, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47382692", "by": "meerab", "date": "2026-03-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "for bursty, infrequent workloads that already use R2 for storage, Containers are a natural fit.", "excerpt": "We run a similar setup in production at VideoToBe \u2013 FFmpeg inside Cloudflare Containers with R2 mounted as a local filesystem via FUSE (tigrisfs). On the debate about Cloudflare vs Fly vs spot instances \u2013 for bursty, infrequent workloads that already use R2 for storage, Containers are a natural fit. The container accesses R2 over Cloudflare's internal network, so files never hit the public internet. Check out our imp", "context": "runs VideoToBe in production", "use_case": "running FFmpeg video processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare"}, {"id": 758120016, "item_id": 47382501, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47382501", "by": "rozenmd", "date": "2026-03-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is the perfect use of cloudflare containers.", "excerpt": "This is the perfect use of cloudflare containers. Rare, bursty workloads that fit around regular use of Workers. I use them to generate thumbnails when uploading large photo files for my personal flickr clone, not even noticeable in billing.", "context": "", "use_case": "thumbnail generation for photos", "switched_from": "", "story": "Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare"}, {"id": 743108192, "item_id": 46444262, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46444262", "by": "slig", "date": "2025-12-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Should be possible with this, no?", "excerpt": "Should be possible with this, no? https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Doom in Django: testing the limits of LiveView at 600.000 divs/segundo"}, {"id": 736559713, "item_id": 46034982, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46034982", "by": "NicoJuicy", "date": "2025-11-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Cloudflare Containers is literally \"pay for usage\", while AWS is pay for capacity.", "excerpt": "I think this is \"an\" misleading answer from AWS to Cloudflare Containers. It looks like just AWS ECS with default values/setup. You'll still need to pay for the load balancer, networking resources, ... It will also never scale to zero. Cloudflare Containers is literally \"pay for usage\", while AWS is pay for capacity. https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/2025-11-21-new-cpu-pricing/ AWS will never drop their pro", "context": "", "use_case": "Pay-per-use containers", "switched_from": "", "story": "AWS Announcing Amazon ECS Express Mode"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 771463731, "item_id": 48216483, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48216483", "by": "youngbum", "date": "2026-05-20", "stance": "warn", "quote": "We also tried Cloudflare Containers, but they weren\u2019t as reliable as just spinning up a small VM.", "excerpt": "Huge fan of Hocuspocus. Congrats on the new release and grateful for your efforts. We have been using Hocuspocus to sync multiple users in our form builder editor (https://walla.my), and they were very reliable and sturdy. We not only write descriptions with TipTap but also sync the fields and logic itself. Actually, the previous version was eligible to build and deploy with Bun though. We did also try to deploy them", "context": "form builder developer", "use_case": "hosting Hocuspocus", "switched_from": "", "story": null}]}], "who": [{"by": "jgrahamc", "context": "Retired Cloudflare CTO, left March 2025", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48610254", "date": "2026-06-20"}, {"by": "meerab", "context": "runs VideoToBe in production", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47382692", "date": "2026-03-14"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["hosting hocuspocus", "running ffmpeg video processing", "thumbnail generation for photos", "dev sandbox hosting", "pay-per-use containers"], "compared": [{"slug": "cloudflare-workers", "name": "Cloudflare Workers", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608394", "title": "Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI Agents", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320571", "title": "Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48208834", "title": "item 48208834", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859540", "title": "Show HN: Img-src \u2013 $5/month image CDN with on-the-fly transforms via URL params", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735139", "title": "Nobody Likes Lag: How to Make Low-Latency Dev Sandboxes", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46409359", "title": "Doom in Django: testing the limits of LiveView at 600.000 divs/segundo", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 2}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {"warn": 1}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 777779905, "item_id": 48611244, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611244", "by": "unix1", "date": "2026-06-20", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I run workers and containers and am curious what you mean.", "excerpt": "> simply expose containers to the world directly - without having to go via workers. I run workers and containers and am curious what you mean. Do you have specific use cases in mind outside of the worker invocation model? If so, I'm curious what you'd want to run on Cloudflare. Otherwise, workers don't have to be much of a \"lockin\" if treated as a thin layer, more like configuration. > You have other amazing parts o", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI Agents"}, {"id": 777764064, "item_id": 48610254, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48610254", "by": "jgrahamc", "date": "2026-06-20", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "What advantage does decoupling Cloudflare Containers from Cloudflare Workers have?", "excerpt": "I am here but I retired from being CTO of Cloudflare in March 2025 [1] and the current CTO is Dane Knecht (dknecht here). What advantage does decoupling Cloudflare Containers from Cloudflare Workers have? [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/three-chapters-at-cloudflare-programmer-to-cto-to-board-of-directors/", "context": "Retired Cloudflare CTO, left March 2025", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI Agents"}, {"id": 771463731, "item_id": 48216483, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48216483", "by": "youngbum", "date": "2026-05-20", "stance": "warn", "quote": "We also tried Cloudflare Containers, but they weren\u2019t as reliable as just spinning up a small VM.", "excerpt": "Huge fan of Hocuspocus. Congrats on the new release and grateful for your efforts. We have been using Hocuspocus to sync multiple users in our form builder editor (https://walla.my), and they were very reliable and sturdy. We not only write descriptions with TipTap but also sync the fields and logic itself. Actually, the previous version was eligible to build and deploy with Bun though. We did also try to deploy them", "context": "form builder developer", "use_case": "hosting Hocuspocus", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 758123072, "item_id": 47382692, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47382692", "by": "meerab", "date": "2026-03-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "for bursty, infrequent workloads that already use R2 for storage, Containers are a natural fit.", "excerpt": "We run a similar setup in production at VideoToBe \u2013 FFmpeg inside Cloudflare Containers with R2 mounted as a local filesystem via FUSE (tigrisfs). On the debate about Cloudflare vs Fly vs spot instances \u2013 for bursty, infrequent workloads that already use R2 for storage, Containers are a natural fit. The container accesses R2 over Cloudflare's internal network, so files never hit the public internet. Check out our imp", "context": "runs VideoToBe in production", "use_case": "running FFmpeg video processing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare"}, {"id": 758120016, "item_id": 47382501, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47382501", "by": "rozenmd", "date": "2026-03-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is the perfect use of cloudflare containers.", "excerpt": "This is the perfect use of cloudflare containers. Rare, bursty workloads that fit around regular use of Workers. I use them to generate thumbnails when uploading large photo files for my personal flickr clone, not even noticeable in billing.", "context": "", "use_case": "thumbnail generation for photos", "switched_from": "", "story": "Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare"}, {"id": 749839715, "item_id": 46864982, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46864982", "by": "taehun", "date": "2026-02-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "deployed it on Cloudflare Containers", "excerpt": "You're right, and I apologize for the inaccurate information. Cloudflare Images does support on-the-fly transformations via URL parameters. In fact, img-src.io's infrastructure runs on Cloudflare, and I initially considered wrapping Cloudflare Images for the transformation layer. However, the cost of scaling became prohibitive\u2014if 100k free-tier users each transform 1k images, I'd be bankrupt. So I built a custom tran", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Img-src \u2013 $5/month image CDN with on-the-fly transforms via URL params"}, {"id": 747848320, "item_id": 46740520, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46740520", "by": "nickandbro", "date": "2026-01-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use cloudflare containers", "excerpt": "Interesting, I use cloudflare containers and it takes roughly 6-7 seconds to boot up using a very lightweight image.", "context": "", "use_case": "Dev sandbox hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Nobody Likes Lag: How to Make Low-Latency Dev Sandboxes"}, {"id": 743108192, "item_id": 46444262, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46444262", "by": "slig", "date": "2025-12-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Should be possible with this, no?", "excerpt": "Should be possible with this, no? https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Doom in Django: testing the limits of LiveView at 600.000 divs/segundo"}, {"id": 736559713, "item_id": 46034982, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46034982", "by": "NicoJuicy", "date": "2025-11-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Cloudflare Containers is literally \"pay for usage\", while AWS is pay for capacity.", "excerpt": "I think this is \"an\" misleading answer from AWS to Cloudflare Containers. It looks like just AWS ECS with default values/setup. You'll still need to pay for the load balancer, networking resources, ... It will also never scale to zero. Cloudflare Containers is literally \"pay for usage\", while AWS is pay for capacity. https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/2025-11-21-new-cpu-pricing/ AWS will never drop their pro", "context": "", "use_case": "Pay-per-use containers", "switched_from": "", "story": "AWS Announcing Amazon ECS Express Mode"}]}