Six months ago, I had never written a line of production code. Today, I'm running 28 Cloudflare Workers that power everything from real-time lead notifications to AI-powered offer grading systems. This is the story of how we got here—and the expensive mistakes that taught us how to build it right.
The Monolith Mistake
Like every developer who learns by doing, my first instinct was to put everything in one place. One worker. One file. One massive mess.
// Everything in one file. Everything breaks together.
export default {
async fetch(request, env) {
if (url.pathname.startsWith('/api/leads')) // 800 lines
if (url.pathname.startsWith('/api/valuation')) // 1,200 lines
if (url.pathname.startsWith('/api/notify')) // 600 lines
// ... 42 more routes, 7,000 more lines
}
}
The Microservices Revelation
The breakthrough came when I realized Cloudflare Workers aren't just "serverless functions"—they're globally distributed microservices that can call each other at the edge. Each worker could own one domain. One responsibility. One deployment.
NETWORK
The Code That Powers It
Worker-to-Worker Communication
The magic is that worker-to-worker calls happen at the edge. No round-trip to a central server. Just microseconds between services running in the same data center.
export default {
async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
const lead = await request.json();
const id = await storeLead(lead, env.KV);
// Fan out to other workers (fire & forget)
ctx.waitUntil(Promise.all([
fetch('https://slack-notify.workers.dev', {...}),
fetch('https://valuation.workers.dev', {...}),
]));
return Response.json({ success: true, id });
}
}
The Slack Notification Hub
const templates = {
new_lead: (d) => ({
text: `🔥 *New Lead!*\n${d.name} • ${d.phone}`
}),
payment: (d) => ({
text: `💰 *Payment!* ${d.customer} paid $${d.amount}`
}),
alert: (d) => ({
text: `🚨 *Alert!* ${d.message}`
})
};
The Evolution
The Cost Reality
This is where it gets fun. We're running enterprise-grade infrastructure for less than a Netflix subscription.
28 workers, 2.3M requests/month
Same functionality, 10x the cost
Lessons Learned
- Start with microservices. The refactoring cost me two weeks. Starting right costs nothing.
- Use Service Bindings. Worker-to-worker calls without HTTP overhead. 20% latency improvement.
- Cache aggressively in KV. KV reads are ~10ms globally. We cache everything cacheable.
- Build a logging worker. Central logging across 28 workers. Debugging would be impossible otherwise.
- Embrace the edge. Your code runs in 200+ locations. Design for it.