Cloudflare has launched K2 in public beta, introducing a serverless event-streaming service built on R2 object storage. Announced on October 1, it is designed to keep producers and consumers from needing to process data at the same speed or remain online at the same time.
Applications send events to an ordered log, and consumers can read them independently. Cloudflare describes both shared-work subscriptions and a publish-subscribe pattern in which separate consumers receive all the messages. The storage-backed design also supports retaining historical events.
The beta is available to accounts with Workers Paid subscriptions. At launch, Cloudflare lists a 10 GB storage limit and a 30 MB-per-second production limit per stream, with K2 usage not billed during the beta period.
For developers, the trade-off is worth examining before choosing a messaging service. Cloudflare reports roughly one second of production latency at the 99th percentile in the initial release because events are batched into object-storage segments. Its roadmap includes lower-latency options and Kafka-client support, but those are future plans rather than existing capabilities.
Related: Cloudflare previews Workers KV Instant for global configuration data.
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