Payload on Workers: a full-fledged CMS, running entirely on Cloudflare’s stack

Payload on Workers presents a full-fledged CMS running on Cloudflare’s stack, with a new template that lets you deploy Payload to Cloudflare in a single click, binding to Cloudflare D1 and R2. The Payload project has over 35,000 stars on GitHub and was acquired by Figma, and Cloudflare notes how its 24/7 video platform, Cloudflare TV, served as a test bed for the template.

The article explains how hosting on Workers provides a serverless model where code runs only when users are active, and highlights a sample Payload instance with a two-table database for media and users, which can be extended easily. It also covers how Cloudflare implemented that Payload can connect to Postgres via an external database with Hyperdrive for connection pooling, and how a custom D1 adapter was built to support the D1 database, together with a custom R2 storage adapter to use the bound R2 bucket.

Finally, read replicas across the globe reduced P50 wall-time by 60%, from 300ms to 120ms, when the database was located in Eastern North America, illustrating the performance gains possible with global replication. according to Cloudflare.