The Cloudflare Blog – Brought to you by EmDash

Summary

Cloudflare migrated its official blog to EmDash, an Astro-focused content management system, acting as internal Customer Zero to evaluate scaling and usability. To prepare for traffic spikes reaching thousands of requests per second, engineers used k6 to execute ramp, breakpoint, and burst load tests. The resulting production architecture runs EmDash on Cloudflare Workers, pairing it with Workers Cache, an object cache backed by Workers KV, and Hyperdrive connected to PlanetScale. This layered caching design serves 99.5 percent of static files and 70 percent of requests from cache, flattening p95 latency under real-world loads reaching 850 requests per second. The migration also introduced a frontend redesign using the Kumo design system and added Model Context Protocol servers for automated agent workflows.

Takeaways

1. 1

   A multi-layer caching architecture combining Workers Cache and a Workers KV object cache served 99.5% of static files and 70% of requests from cache, eliminating p95 latency spikes.

2. 2

   Load testing with k6 evaluated availability and latency under 7,000 RPS bursts, enforcing strict thresholds of under 0.01% 5xx errors and sub-500ms p95 response times.

3. 3

   The platform integrated Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, enabling external agents to query posts and allowing authors to create, edit, and schedule content via agentic tooling.