Cloudflare launches Workers KV Instant: reads 100 times faster with Quicksilver

Cloudflare announced on 1 October 2026, on its official blog, a new mode for Workers KV called KV Instant, aimed at those who read configurations and application flags on every request and cannot afford the latency of the classic mode. For anyone running applications distributed at global scale, the key point is the end of the "cold read penalty": no more waiting on the first access to populate the edge cache.\n\n## What changes from a technical standpoint\n\nKV Instant is powered by Quicksilver v2, a key-value store developed in-house by Cloudflare to enable fast global replication and low-latency access at planetary scale — the same system the company uses to route every request across its network. Until now it had never been made available to customers.\n\nThe API remains the familiar one: the same simple Workers KV API — get(), put(), list(), delete(). Three practical differences worth noting: the "instant" mode must be specified when creating the namespace, metadata isn't supported (getWithMetadata always returns null), and list operations return all keys without pagination.\n\n## The numbers measured by Cloudflare\n\n| Metric | KV Instant | Classic Workers KV |\n|---|---|---|\n| p99 reads (cached) | N/A | 160 ms |\n| p99 reads (all) | 1.62 ms | 287 ms |\n| median write replication | 107 ms | < 1 s |\n| p95 write replication | 181 ms | < 1 s |\n| p99 write replication | 256 ms | 4.38 s |\n\nOn pricing, Cloudflare states: Class B operations (reads) · Class A operations (put, delete, list) · Storage — Workers KV Instant: $0.20 per million, $0.10 per operation, $100 per MB per month; Workers KV: $0.50 per million, $5.00 per million, $0.50 per GB per month.\n\nThe size limits are tight: each key can be up to 300 bytes, values can be of any size as long as the namespace doesn't exceed one megabyte in total, and KV Instant namespaces can hold up to 10,000 key-value pairs. In addition, to guarantee write consistency, the service enforces a single write per second per namespace, which is more restrictive than the single write per second per key allowed in classic mode.\n\n## Who should consider it\n\nFor those storing large volumes of data or updating keys frequently, classic Workers KV remains the cheaper option in terms of writes and storage. KV Instant makes sense for application configurations that are read on every request but rarely updated: feature flags, routing, homepage parameters during a product launch.\n\nThe service is in private beta: sign-ups are handled via the form linked in Cloudflare's official post.