Product Introduction

1. Cloudflare Agents is a platform designed for building scalable, stateful AI agents that integrate autonomy, goal-directed reasoning, and adaptive decision-making. It combines Cloudflare’s serverless compute (Workers), state management (Durable Objects), and real-time communication tools to enable durable execution and dynamic scaling. Developers can create agents that interact with external systems, process user inputs, and maintain persistent states across interactions.
2. The core value lies in its ability to simplify the development of agentic AI systems by abstracting infrastructure complexities, ensuring cost-efficient scaling, and providing native integration with AI models and external APIs. It eliminates the need for managing servers or over-provisioning resources, allowing developers to focus on agent logic and user experience.

Main Features

1. Stateful Execution with Durable Objects: Agents maintain persistent states across interactions using Durable Objects, enabling long-running workflows and real-time data synchronization. This ensures agents remember context, track progress, and recover from interruptions without data loss.
2. Serverless Inference with Workers AI: Direct integration with Cloudflare’s global GPU network allows agents to run AI models (e.g., Llama 3.3) serverlessly, reducing latency and costs. Developers can also connect to external LLMs via AI Gateway for unified logging, caching, and rate limiting.
3. Real-Time Communication Tools: Built-in support for WebSockets, WebSocket Hibernation, and Pages facilitates bidirectional communication between agents and users. Hibernation reduces costs by suspending inactive connections while preserving session states.

Problems Solved

1. Unpredictable Scaling Costs: Traditional cloud providers charge for idle resources or wall-clock time, but Cloudflare Agents uses CPU-time billing, ensuring costs align with actual compute usage. This is critical for AI agents that may wait for external APIs or user inputs.
2. State Management in Serverless Environments: Stateless serverless functions struggle with multi-step agent workflows, but Durable Objects provide persistent storage and atomic updates, enabling complex, stateful interactions.
3. Integration Complexity: Agents often require combining AI models, APIs, and real-time comms. The platform unifies these components, offering pre-built tools for browser rendering, vector search (Vectorize), and database operations (D1).

Unique Advantages

1. Unified Platform for AI and Execution: Unlike fragmented solutions, Cloudflare Agents combines state, compute, AI, and tools in one environment, reducing development overhead. Competitors typically require stitching together separate services for these functions.
2. WebSocket Hibernation: Unique to Cloudflare, this feature suspends inactive WebSocket connections while retaining their state in Durable Objects, cutting costs for real-time apps with sporadic usage.
3. Granular Pricing Model: Billing based on CPU time (not wall time) and per-request LLM inference costs ensures predictable expenses, even for agents with variable or spiky workloads.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. How does pricing work for agents with long-running workflows? Cloudflare charges only for CPU time spent processing tasks, not waiting time, and WebSocket Hibernation minimizes costs for idle connections. Durable Objects are billed per active object, not uptime.
2. Can I use external AI models with Cloudflare Agents? Yes, AI Gateway provides a unified interface to connect to OpenAI, Anthropic, or custom models, with added benefits like request caching and abuse mitigation.
3. How are real-time updates handled in large-scale deployments? WebSockets and Durable Objects ensure low-latency updates, while Workers distribute compute globally, scaling automatically to handle millions of concurrent agent interactions.