How We Could Save Petabytes of Cache Storage With Zstandard and Pingora
Cloudflare, Tuesday, September 1st, 2026
Cloudflare prototyped compressing cached objects inside its cache with Zstandard and Pingora to reclaim petabytes of storage.
Cloudflare asked whether it could get more cache capacity out of the same hardware, and prototyped compression inside the cache itself to find out.
The experiment uses Zstandard compression integrated with Pingora, Cloudflare's Rust proxy framework, to transcode cached objects. The post walks through the engineering tradeoffs, including the CPU cost of compression against the storage and hit-rate benefits.
The projected saving is measured in petabytes of cache storage across the fleet.