Cloudflare Launches Workers KV Instant: 100x Faster Reads via Quicksilver

Cloudflare has introduced Workers KV Instant, a new mode for its Workers KV key-value store that pushes writes globally for near-instant availability without cold read penalties. The company announced the mode on October 1, 2026, during its Birthday Week, saying it is powered by Quicksilver v2, the internal key-value store Cloudflare has used for years but never previously made available to customers.

According to Cloudflare, KV Instant delivers p99 reads in 1.62 milliseconds across all reads, compared with 287 ms in classic mode, and 160 ms for cached reads in classic mode. The company says that is more than 100 times faster, with p95 read times measured in microseconds. Writes replicate to the edge over 20 times faster: Cloudflare reports a median write replication of 107 ms, p95 of 181 ms and p99 of 256 ms, versus under one second for classic mode at p95 and 4.38 seconds at p99.

KV Instant uses the same Workers KV API developers already build with — get(), put(), list() and delete() — so existing code patterns carry over. Cloudflare positions the mode for infrequently updated application configuration, such as feature flags and settings that need to be readable on every request and updated globally almost immediately.

Three differences from classic Workers KV

Cloudflare lists three key differences when working with KV Instant. You must specify KV Instant mode when creating a KV namespace by passing the “mode”: “instant” attribute. Metadata is not supported, so getWithMetadata calls always return null and put does not accept metadata. And list operations return all matching keys in a namespace, with no pagination.

The company gives the example of a product launch where a homepage needs to switch at a keynote moment: a flag read from KV Instant on every request can flip globally without waiting for a TTL to expire. Cloudflare says nearly every request to its network already looks up at least one key in Quicksilver, and that KV Instant is not for every type of data — it is aimed at the same infrequently updated configuration data Cloudflare uses Quicksilver for internally.

Cloudflare has not published pricing for KV Instant in the announcement. Developers can create a KV namespace in Instant mode today by setting the mode attribute when creating the namespace.

Related reading

Sources

• Introducing Workers KV Instant — powered by Quicksilver — Cloudflare Blog